Forsaken Trust

by Meredith Doench

  I leaned in close to Henderson, so close that the edge of my shoulder nearly touched hers. “It’s official, Wilma. There’s a serial killer working hard in Wallace Lake.”

  “You don’t know anything, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “This one”—I tapped one of the photos with my finger—“this woman looks a little like you, doesn’t she?”

  A visible shiver ran through Henderson, and her hand shot to her wrist where she rubbed the bandana covering the tattoo. “I said I don’t know her,” Henderson grumbled.

  “What does the tattoo mean, Wilma?” Harvey asked. “And what does it have to do with you?”

  Henderson slid off the stool and puffed up her thinning hair with some spray. “I told you, I don’t know anything about nothing. I’m back onstage in four minutes.”

  I collected the victims’ photos and tried a different route before Wilma Henderson completely shut us out. “You’ve heard from Sadie, then, right?”

  The mention of her daughter caught Wilma off guard. She watched me close in the reflection of the mirror. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but it must be hard on the girl whose mom works the stage and streets every night. These killings must be making her sick with worry.”

  “My mom takes good care of Sadie. She’s all right. Besides, she’s eighteen now and not my problem.”

  “Sounds like you never considered Sadie your problem.”

  Wilma smirked.

  I stood, making sure I could still see her expressions in the reflection of the mirror. “Your daughter is enmeshed in your world whether you want her to be or not, Wilma. If she wasn’t, you wouldn’t have gotten the call from her to hide the tattoo.”

  Wilma Henderson tried to ignore me as she primped one last time and then rushed toward the stage when a buzzer sounded. Loud music and the sounds of men cheering filled the entire bar.

  Harvey and I watched a few minutes after Wilma Henderson took the stage. Despite her age, Henderson moved well, flipping her long bleached hair over her face and then behind her shoulders. She spilled out of her top, heavy breasts hoisted up with all the colorful fabric strings. Henderson pranced about the stage in her high heels, and I recognized a toughness in her flint-hard edges that had been formed through years of rough living. There was a loyalty to Wilma Henderson, a code of silence that I respected in some ways. Her refusal to discuss the tattoo confirmed something I’d been thinking all along—whatever the double-hearted image and its number two meant, it wasn’t just a mark of loyalty among the members of the group. It wasn’t something meant to give its members bragging rights, but rather it stood as a marker that told them they belonged. Sometimes knowing you belong to a place and to someone is all a person really needs in this lifetime. And sometimes that safety of belonging is enough to kill for.

  *

  I stopped swimming in the shallow end of the pool and floated for a few minutes watching the giant light fixtures as they buzzed above me. It was after ten p.m. Exhaustion racked my body, but it felt good to be in a pool again. I let my arms and legs relax, giving myself up to the will of the water. I took a deep breath just before my face slipped under the water’s membrane, and its heavy pressure encased me. My heartbeat thumped inside my ears as I sank. Down, down, down.

  It was moments like these in the water when I did my best thinking, when my brain finally quieted and I felt safest. The water gave me the space to flip and turn that Rubik’s Cube of a problematic case into multiple possibilities. My dad always told me it was the relaxation of the mind that allowed the pieces of a case to connect. He swore he did his best work while he jogged his daily five miles. The repetitive motion of running had done for him what swimming did for me, and I let my mind wander wherever it wanted to go. Images filtered across my closed eyelids: the women who had died, the river and its reputation for fog, the ominous Dead Man’s Point where so many had died in accidents. I thought of the forest that surrounded the rivers and Wallace Lake, the coverage it provided, and the very real opportunities the forest offered to hide a body that might never be found. Over the last hundred years or so, there had been a few instances in the Wallace Lake area of a person disappearing without a trace. If these options were easily available to the killer, why choose to dump the bodies in a location they would be found by people on the water or driving the road? Three of the victims had been found on the land bars. Clearly, the killer wanted the women found and had positioned them just so, with their heads pointed toward the forest. Whoever killed them also showed the victims a sliver of modesty or respect: the victims were placed facedown in the sand hiding most of their nudity. And with the faces partially buried, the killer had saved parts of their skin from the rodents and wildlife. Such a placement indicated that the victims most likely knew who killed them. Whoever committed these crimes couldn’t stand to leave the victims in the open for long. And then there was the use of antifreeze and the stab wounds to the back. All of these details led me to believe the victims trusted the killer.

  I’d seen something like this before. Hadn’t I?

  My head burst through the surface of the water, and I gulped in a large breath of air as the sounds echoed in the empty poolroom. I nearly laughed out loud: I did recognize a lot of these traits.

  Why hadn’t I thought of Linda Clarke earlier?

  Chapter Four

  Day One: 11:00 p.m.

  The Brazilian wandering spider is thought to be one of the most deadly spiders on earth. These little vessels of death like to hide inside banana leaves where they can plunge their venom into the unsuspecting hands that pluck its fruit. It attacks by rising up on its hind legs and lengthening its body before it lunges, sort of like a human. One of the most interesting things about this spider, though, is that one of the side effects of its venom is very painful and prolonged erections in men. Hence, Linda Clarke was dubbed by the FBI not as a black widow, but the BWS Killer, short for the Brazilian wandering spider. What can I say? Sometimes profilers’ sense of humor shows and we need some way to relieve all the grizzly horror we see every day.

  The Brazilian wandering spider, or the BWS case to be exact, was how Colby Sanders and I reconnected. I’d seen quite a bit of him as a child, but he hadn’t been around much during my teen years once he went off to work in DC. While I was studying at the academy, Sanders showed up as a guest speaker in one of my courses. He was brought in specifically to discuss his experience on the 1976 case of Linda Clarke. Everyone had heard of Sanders—he was an Ohio native and the rock star of profiling and we’d studied his major cases in our classes. Linda Clarke had been his biggest, and he’d written a fair amount of articles and studies on the case. I watched the man who had once shared PB&J sandwiches with me for lunch take the podium looking very small under the auditorium’s bright lights.

  “What can I tell you about Linda Clarke?” Even then, Sanders’s voice was gruff with the years of smoking menthols. He paused for the punch line. “She’s one crazy bitch.”

  Laughter erupted, and I saw that familiar glint of a smile from Sanders.

  *

  After a hot shower in the hotel room, I put on a pair of boxers and an old Stevie Nicks T-shirt. I slipped into my lucky Frye boots without bothering to lace them. I always hated walking in my bare feet in hotel rooms. No matter how clean the carpet looked, it freaked me out to think what might be lurking within those fibers. Chalk those fears up to the many joys of knowing too much about crime scene investigation.

  My swim and the sudden burst of ideas had given me a much needed second wind. I’d commenced with the ritual of using a murder board to help solve the case. My father taught me the board did its best work when you weren’t looking. It was all about the act of building the case and the process of pinning down each piece of evidence. My dad insisted the board should be left out in the open, in the space where you lived, because it worked subconsciously. He swore the facts of the case and the minor details seeped into your mi
nd and somehow puzzled themselves out when you least expected it. My dad was the best investigator I’d ever met and definitely superstitious about his process. He passed those beliefs on to me as well.

  I’d already pushed the desk toward the center of the room and gave myself a good three feet of wall space to use as a makeshift murder board. With four distinct columns, I tacked each of the victims’ photos across the top. Along the side, I placed what I called my wild cards: information and clues that I knew would be important but hadn’t quite figured out yet. I tacked in a photo of the matching tattoo and a picture of Linda Clarke from 1976 with her long flowing blond hair looking like she just stepped out of an eighties Prell commercial. Wilma Henderson had a spot there, too, along with a map and topography information about the Powell River and Wallace Lake area. Granted, this particular image-driven board was pathetically simple and lacked evidence. Like my father, though, I trusted that somehow, some way, it would all eventually come together. I felt as though I faced a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with all its tiny pieces scattered about. I sat cross-legged on the corner of my bed, my boots tucked under each knee, and considered all the long stretches of missing connections.

  It was times like these I missed my father most. One of my dad’s favorite parts of crime scene investigation had been the reenactment of the possible ways a murder case might have gone down. One of the worst fallouts of solving the Willow’s Ridge case was that my dad’s ghost had nearly vanished from my life. I’d grown used to his presence and loved the chance to bounce ideas off him just as we’d done my entire life. I couldn’t make sense of why he’d left after the Willow’s Ridge case. Perhaps he’d only been hanging around to help me solve the case that had been so prominent in my life. Perhaps once Marci’s killer was found and killed, my dad felt at peace and was able to move on. But no matter how I tried to explain his disappearance, I couldn’t picture my father not doing detective work—it had been such a vital part of his existence. Through his devotion to law enforcement and justice, I’d learned to love it as well.

  In my father’s absence, I faced my own crisis of faith. Without his help, I questioned my own abilities. Now that our partnership was broken, I’d lost confidence that I could work without him. How much of the crime solving was really me, and how much was him? The clock ticked on—this killer had already taken four lives and would certainly kill another woman. What if I couldn’t stop the killer without my father’s help?

  I reached for a pencil and scribbled on a purple Post-it note next to Henderson’s name, Highway interchange. Gary’s Girls? Long haul drivers’ route? I stared at the image of the double-hearted tattoo and listened to the ice machine down the hall gurgle out ice cubes.

  Who gets identical tattoos with a group of people? I thought back to college, to the sororities and fraternities on campus who tattooed their symbol just above the ankle—I’d heard rumors back then that the body location for the tattoo changed every year, but the image remained the same. A few people from my class in the academy celebrated graduation with matching tattoos of their new badges on their shoulders. I’d also heard of friends or family members getting group tattoos to honor a promise or to remember someone who’d passed. Shared tattoos, no matter how big the group, were all about loyalty. It was that tenacious devotion to a group or a belief that bound them all together.

  I’d seen strong levels of loyalty before in the One True Path ex-gay ministry. I’d been a member of Pastor Jameson’s group as a teen. My father sent me to the group for help once he read my journal and realized I had feelings for other girls. Many members would have done just about anything the pastor asked, including follow him into death. And nearly all of the members would have had no problem getting a shared tattoo to declare their loyalty to the pastor and the group. At the time of the Willow’s Ridge case, the Bureau had labeled some of these devout behaviors of the One True Path members as a cult. Could we be dealing here with a similar situation where one person held all the power? Maybe it was a pastor, a caretaker, a doctor, a teacher—or, given the victims’ occupations, a pimp.

  I searched my documents for the case studies I’d worked on in the academy. I’d snagged a one-on-one interview with Sanders about the Clarke case and had been highly envied by my classmates because of it. The truth was Sanders had only said yes because of my father. After Sanders moved on to DC, my father continued to work a few cases with him, and they shared, most importantly, good will. The interview had been part of a final project toward the end of my days in the academy and work I’d been really proud of at the time. I’d been so nervous to interview Sanders—I truly admired him and his detective work.

  Finally, I found it, my recorded interview with Sanders, stuck in a file I’d titled Spidey Sense.

  LH: Let’s start at the beginning. Why were you asked to assist with the Linda Clarke case?

  CS: She was apprehended in Denver, but she committed murder in six different states. It became a federal rather than a state case. They needed me to determine if there were murders committed by Clarke that they hadn’t identified yet.

  LH: Who was Clarke accused of killing?

  CS: Her husbands. We found six, but I’m still not sure we’ve accounted for all of her victims. She’s made comments to cellmates that indicate there could be more bodies.

  LH: You personally interviewed her about the murders. What were your first impressions?

  CS: She was very beautiful with long golden hair and big blue eyes. She had this pouty look about her and came across as an innocent victim. She was childlike, you know, in many ways, so people wanted to take care of her. Clarke was the last person most would expect to do something like this.

  LH: She certainly had no trouble getting a husband.

  CS: Not at all, which is exactly why she got the nickname of the BWS, the Brazilian wandering spider! Men couldn’t seem to help themselves around her. They fell under her sexual spell, so to speak. I’m told she gets multiple letters a week in prison from lovesick followers vying for her hand in marriage. She’s a temptress, no doubt about it.

  LH: How was Clarke able to get away with these crimes for so long?

  CS: She was incredibly methodical about her work. She poisoned her husbands slowly. Most took at least three months to die. She chose a poison that was not easily detected in the seventies. The doctors who treated her husbands wrote the deaths off as a reaction to a medication or a deadly food allergy. She was smart after the murders, as well. She completely uprooted and moved thousands of miles away. As far as we know, she never talked about the murders to anyone. Most killers can’t keep their mouths shut—Clarke could. She fooled a lot of people.

  LH: Until the doctor of her last victim.

  CS: Yes. Thanks to this very observant ER doctor, she was finally arrested on murder charges. He recognized the odd burn pattern on the lining of Clarke’s husband’s esophagus and tongue.

  LH: Do you believe she’s mentally insane?

  CS: Clarke is a sadist. She simply terrifies me. Multiple days of testimony were devoted to Clarke’s insanity defense. I’m sure there were all kinds of psychologists and psychiatrists out there who would have deemed her mentally impaired.

  LH: But you wouldn’t?

  CS: Back then, we used those big eight-track recorders to record suspects’ confessions. We thought it was top-rate technology. Do you even know what that is? Anyway, I brought her in once we got that old dinosaur running. She took one look at the machine and gave me her sweetest smile. I saw a shift in her behavior. She plunged into actress mode. I could almost see the gears turning in her head. Always plotting, that one. Clarke decided with her lawyer an insanity defense would be her best bet, and she played it to the hilt that day with me.

  LH: How so?

  CS: Hansen, she held that syrupy sweet smile the entire time she recounted a few of the men’s deaths. If you could only see her and not hear the words, you would have thought she was talking about someone she adored—her child or a beloved parent. S
he delighted in the pain these men suffered. She went on to explain to me that what happened with these men was only a mistake. She’d miscalculated the amount of poison in their food. The men had died much too soon. She’d hoped some of them would suffer for months. A calculated sadist, I tell you. Those men were lucky she wasn’t better with her computation skills.

  LH: In order to prolong the suffering, she took them to the hospital for treatment to keep them alive. Once they were on the mend, she poisoned them all over again.

  CS: The medical attention for her victims gave Clarke a cover, and it also gave her the chance to begin her deadly games all over again. A black widow engages through high dramatics and will generally make her arrival into an emergency room with her victim known. Like the classic black widow, Clarke produced loud wailing sobs, dramatic prayers, and boisterous claims that her husband had been so healthy. She loved the chaos of the emergency room, the drama of touch-and-go life-saving techniques, and most of all, elaborate funerals. The black widow thrives on the knowledge that the reason people all around her suffer and grieve are because of her. It can be an enormous head-rush for most of these female serial killers, and their behavior is only fueled by sympathy and attention.

  LH: Poison is considered the prime weapon for a black widow. However, Clarke’s case was different.

  CS: Very different in that regard. Remember, everything was about her—she wanted as much attention as she could drum up. So, rather than allowing the husband to die in a hospital or quietly at home, she broke the black widow mold by leaving her dead husbands in very public places where they would be found. One was found in his office slumped in a chair at work. Another was found in a parked car in a grocery lot. The local press picked up on some of these deaths, which delighted Clarke. She needed the bodies to be found publicly to create an exaggerated level of drama and attention.