True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  The Croteau connection took us to yet another post by Beagle, on the Bismark, North Dakota Topix board, where he admitted to being questioned as a suspect in the Maura Murray case:

  The MA PI [private investigator] would not have wasted his time asking me whether or not I killed Maura if he thought the answer could not have been yes. Most likely he looked at the totality of my answer. Although I vocalized a strongly confident no (because I didn’t kill her), I’m not sure how he might have read the rest of my answer—that is, my body language. See the old Reid Interrogation Technique for a better answer. I’m also told there is a video game called LA Noir, in which the character(s) use some kind of software to evaluate whether or not subjects are telling the truth.

  “It’s also true that LE [law enforcement], such as Mass. State Police, will use experts to help them investigate a difficult case. This particular MA PI would be an easy fit because of his previous experience as a detective in MSP and former head of its Behavioral Sciences Unit. He’s very good at his job and has contracted to gov’t. before.

  Or maybe it has something to do with [John] Stobierski’s civil suit against the Springfield MA Roman Catholic Diocese. Stobierski, a Greenfield MA attorney in private practice, represents the family of murdered thirteen-year-old altar boy Daniel Croteau. When I showed Stobierski, who had worked on the Molly Bish [homicide] a phone bill I found relating to the Bish case, he became instantly upset and told me to get this junk (copy of the phone bill) off his desk.

  It was apparent to me that Mr112Dirtbag was now posting more videos in response to the attention he was getting from my blog. I was feeding this man’s obsessions, making him a celebrity. We were having a conversation, the journalist and the maniac. And though I did not know who he was, he was very aware of me.

  Before he set his sights on my son, Beagle posted one more video that linked him to a horrific killing spree in New Hampshire and a brazen escape from a mental ward for the criminally insane.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mr. 1974

  Beagle/112dirtbag/Mr112Dirtbag never left his videos up for long. But Lance Reenstierna downloaded them before they could be removed. Lance was on constant alert and sometimes only had five minutes to grab the new clip. On Valentine’s Day, Beagle posted three new videos.

  In a clip titled “No Hope for Mental Wannabe,” Beagle wears a Panama hat and plays an electric keyboard in a dingy basement. The basement is furnished. There are old wood-paneled walls and steps leading to the ground floor. He dances like a character out of a David Lynch movie and the whole thing ends with a shot of him playing the sax.

  Clip number two, titled “Bodies of Water,” is a video of a stone bridge shot from inside a car during a summer rainstorm. Superimposed titles and soft music make this clip seem like the opening of a horror film. It reads: Sassamon Films presents Colleen Reston; Kenneth Patton; Directed by Tracy Adamson.

  In the third clip, Beagle is dressed like a member of a road construction crew: yellow reflective vest, hard hat. This one is titled: “Man Loses It.” He looks at the camera and says, in a manufactured southern drawl, “Hi, I’m Mr. 1974.” He goes silent for twenty seconds, then says, “I’m not Mr. 1974. I’m a private detective, isn’t that right, Dr. Anthony?” Then he plays with a jar of pink slime, getting his fingers sticky and wet. “Happy New Year,” he says at the end. “And drive safe.”

  The Irregulars went right to work, trying to uncover the hidden clues behind the Valentine’s Day posts. The best anyone could do on “Sassamon” was that it might refer to a golf course called Sassamon Trace, in Natick, Mass. Or it could be an obscure reference to John Sassamon, a Native American interpreter, born about 1600, whose assassination started King Philip’s War. The other names were not real actors. But I have a theory. I think they might all be doctors. Kenneth Patton and Tracy Adamson are the names of doctors in Cincinnati. And there’s a psychiatrist named Dr. Colleen Blanchfield who works in Reston, Virginia. Had Beagle once been a patient?

  But “Mr. 1974”? What the hell did that mean? What happened in 1974 that was important to this man?

  An Irregular named Mike was the first to make the connection to one of New Hampshire’s most frightening unsolved mysteries. John William McGrath was seventeen years old when he took the rifle his uncle had reclaimed from a dead Japanese soldier in WWII and used it to shoot his two younger brothers to death. McGrath waited for his parents to get home, then killed them, too. This all happened in Newport, New Hampshire, in 1962.

  According to articles published in The Boston Globe and the Concord Monitor, McGrath was a star student at Towle High School, voted “class intellectual” by his classmates. He had applied to Dartmouth, and was preparing to play the lead in the school play, The Male Animal. But in a single night, he murdered his entire family. Then he drove forty-five minutes to a Concord mental hospital and calmly turned himself in to the night nurse.

  In 1965, a grand jury refused to press charges against McGrath for the murders because he was insane (it was a different time, folks). McGrath was the ideal patient inside the walls of the mental hospital he was committed to. He wrote book reviews. He painted murals of covered bridges on the hospital walls. By 1969, he’d progressed so much that the superintendent, Dr. Warren Burns, recommended him for conditional parole. McGrath was allowed to take computer classes at New Hampshire Tech, under supervision, of course.

  The new freedom proved too much of a temptation, though. McGrath started bringing drugs into the hospital. Then he burglarized the pharmacy. The new super sent him to prison. He returned to the hospital in 1972. Then, in 1974, he simply walked away from the hospital grounds. He has been missing ever since.

  As Lieutenant Barry Hunter of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department likes to tell reporters: “He could be in a pauper’s grave in Cleveland, Ohio, or a popular businessman in California, or anywhere in between.”

  I thought McGrath’s black-and-white mug shot looked familiar when I pulled it up on my computer. McGrath had a receding forehead, even at seventeen, thin brown hair on the sides. He wore glasses and his ears were overlarge—like Beagle’s. Like Beagle, McGrath wrote intelligent prose, was adept at computers, and had a knack for painting. Could it be?

  By the end of February, Beagle’s videos were international news. Nothing makes an unsolved mystery more thrilling than a psychotic man posting clues about the case on the Internet. Britain’s Daily Mail ran a story. Boston’s Fox affiliate interviewed John Healy, who said, “This has no credibility to me at all.” The Murray family released a statement: “The family is deeply saddened to learn and view that a seemingly clinically disturbed individual would post misleading and cruel videos online. The family respectfully requests the public to ignore and disregard this hideous information and allow investigators to pursue leads of substance and credibility.”

  When I finally told my wife about Beagle, she asked me if there was anything to be worried about—if he might want to harm me, show up at our house with a gun or something. I reminded Julie what my first editor, Pete Kotz, told me when I was researching the Amy Mihaljevic murder for Scene. “You got nothing to fuckin’ worry about. Nobody ever goes after the journalist,” he said. “If they get mad at what you wrote, they’ll go after your source. But you? You’re fine.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Family

  On May 6, Beagle posted a new video. I clicked the link when it arrived in my in-box. As it began to play, I felt my blood run cold. A variety of emotions washed over me. First it was fear. But that quickly dissolved into anger, which condensed into a nugget of pure rage.

  It was a video of my five-year-old son. It looked like footage from a camera, taken of Casey from a parked car near our home. But then I realized it was actually a collection of still photographs. I had taken these pictures. They were family photos I had posted on my private Facebook timeline. Casey playing in front of our house. Casey smiling for the camera.

  Julie sat beside me on the couch. Casey
was asleep upstairs.

  Who do I call? The police? Which police? Akron? Amherst? Haverhill, New Hampshire? Fuck. Who do I call about this?

  As I was thinking it through, the video was deleted. He must have been watching the view count, knowing I had the alerts set up and I would be one of the first to see it. Once the video reached its audience—me—he took it down. Too fast for my friends in Boston to grab it from YouTube. Now, there was no evidence.

  Another video came up in its place. This one was just a black screen with a single word: RENNER.

  He was teasing me.

  The Cymbalta keeps me calm. I’m a calm guy. I am. But there’s a freedom in blind rage once you give yourself over to it that is as welcoming as any drug. On the other side of rage is a certain calm. The eye of the hurricane. I found that place, at age eight, when I was beaten by my stepmother. Her beatings taught me where to find it. I had forgotten how good it felt to give myself over to that pure hatred, that realm of vengeance where you don’t care about consequence or morality. Beat me. Beat me. See if I care. You’re not getting tears from me. Not today. Today all you get is this smile. I didn’t want to call the cops, I realized. I wanted Beagle for myself. Because I knew him for what he was: a crazy man only pretending to be dangerous. And he had no idea who I really was: a dangerous man working really hard not to be crazy. If I had known, truly known, who Beagle was that night, I would have driven a thousand miles to his doorstep.

  Instead, I got drunk. Good and drunk. Beer. Then whiskey until I forgot myself and my anger. And when I woke, hungover, I cuddled with Casey on the couch and watched SpongeBob and took more Cymbalta and thought about other things.

  Later that week, I contacted the New Hampshire State Police and the prosecutor’s office, but nobody was interested in filing charges against an online avatar.

  “Dad?” Casey asked me one day, in as serious a voice as the kid can muster.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “When will you die?”

  I wondered if he had heard some of the conversations I’d had that day, about Beagle. Could he sense there was some danger? “Not for a long time,” I said. “Not until you have kids and they have kids of their own.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But when you die, can I have your iPhone?”

  * * *

  “Push, babe,” I said. “Push, sweetie.”

  It was August 4. We were at Akron City, not the hospital we had planned to be at for this delivery. Akron General turned us away. No room at the inn. Julie’s amniotic fluid was running low and, just to be on the safe side, she wanted an induction. It was early evening when she arrived. A baby girl slipped into the world and suddenly we had two children, one of each.

  We named her Laine. Julie calls her Lainey. I call her Laineybug, or Lois Laine.

  “I think she has red hair,” the nurse said. “Does it run in the family?”

  I cringed. “My grandfather,” I said.

  While we were resting that night, a nurse came in and told us about the man who’d walked into Akron General and shot his wife to death. It happened the same time Lainey was born. If we had been there, as planned, I might have passed the guy in the hall, on the way to tell our parents the good news. What would have happened in that alternate universe? How much of life is coincidence? How much is fate?

  * * *

  In September, a police sergeant sent me an e-mail.

  “I had a recent Town of Chatham resident of ours call me concerned about information he learned about his brother,” she wrote. “Alden Olson is a man known to us for his past odd behavior towards his family as well as disturbing Internet postings. He has been involved with YouTube postings for the ‘Happy Anniversary’ of Maura’s disappearance. This came to our attention when our resident (who has an active restraining order against the man) called me to show me the blog posts he found dated Feb 21, 2012, related to Maura. The man in this and probably the deleted related videos is Alden Olson, last known address of Hadley, MA though we have dealt with him previously in Greenfield, MA back in 2007. He was then known to go under the sign-on name ‘Storagehead’ and family have identified him on this video under ‘mr112dirtbag.’ He has been known to voice his theories and opinions online in a very eccentric manner. Please contact me for anything further on this.”

  I knew who 112dirtbag was now.

  But I let him go.

  He was just another crank, and I had other things to worry about. Night feedings. Diapers. Better things. Fuck him, too.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Bad Rabbit

  I was frustrated by the lack of cooperation from Maura’s family. A case like this can’t be successfully investigated without access to primary sources. So I decided to try Billy’s mom, Sharon Rausch, again, since she lived closest to me.

  Sharon was not home, so I canvassed the neighbors, hoping to get lucky and find someone who’d met Maura during her stays in Ohio. Across the street was a guy named Rick who ran an auto shop out of his garage. Billy’s dad’s truck was in there. Rick was fixing it for the Rausch family before they left on vacation.

  “We grew up here, Billy’s dad and I,” said Rick, a burly, friendly man. “I moved away, then come back. It’s a different world now. We all lost so much.” He pointed down the road. “Neighbors over there lost two kids in an accident. Then, Maura. And a’course Billy’s sister. I come home one night, see all the cop cars. She shot herself in the basement.”

  * * *

  Morrow County is one of those sparse regions of central Ohio where the roads go on for endless stretches between fields of corn. There’s not much need for a coroner to tally up the dead. The part-time Morrow County coroner was a doctor named William Lee, who had a private practice in Cardington, inside a squat ranch home beside Gary’s Discount Outlet. Dr. Lee was a short Asian fellow with a severe accent and a soft voice. I had to ask him to repeat everything so I could make sure I heard him correctly.

  “Heather Rausch had history of depression,” he explained. “Attempts at suicide. It was very sad. And I never found out what she wanted with the sheriff.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “What about the sheriff?”

  “The day she killed herself, she was trying to talk to the sheriff. Said she knew something about some illegal activity. Wanted to talk. I never found out what that was all about.”

  I had found a rabbit hole.

  During any missing-persons investigation, one encounters a number of rabbit holes: avenues of inquiry that open up under your feet, leading you on a ride toward some answer. Only one of those rabbit holes will lead to the solution, though. The others, no matter how good they seem at first, dead-end in happenstance or coincidence. I remember in the Amy Mihaljevic case, I came across this suspect who worked at the local zoo. I found out that he crossed paths with Amy shortly before her murder. When I checked his work records I saw that he’d called in sick the day she was abducted. I questioned him about it, and discovered he was friends with another missing girl, Amanda Berry. Had to be him, right? It wasn’t. As likely as he seemed, he just wasn’t the guy. I lost myself in that rabbit hole for a while.

  So, this Heather Rausch thing. Was it a good lead or a weird dead end? I mean, the first place your mind goes when you hear that Heather needed to talk to the sheriff is that she must have some information about Maura Murray, right? Or at least that’s where I was. That’s what I was thinking.

  I got the police report on Heather’s suicide. A police officer was dispatched to the Rausch residence at 5:39 A.M. the morning of April 20, 2007. From his narrative on the death of Heather Rausch, aged thirty-four:

  “When I entered the home, I noticed an older female standing in the kitchen area and she directed me to a bedroom on the west end of the house. As I entered the bedroom, I noticed that there was a blond haired female laying on the floor in a large pool of blood.… I immediately checked for a pulse but could not find one.… I looked at the bedroom door and noticed a small hole and could see that the
door had been kicked in. I looked around the room and could see a small caliber revolver lying on the floor about 12 inches just west of the victim.”

  Bill (Billy’s father) and Sharon Rausch told the officer that they had gone to bed around 5 A.M. and then were awakened by a loud “crack.” Heather, they said, had spoken of suicide and so Bill had hidden his gun from her. After the crack, he went to find it. It was still there. But it turned out she had purchased another one, in Indiana, a Smith & Wesson .38. That’s the one they found by her body.

  “Chief Deputy Davis and Dr. Lee entered [the] crime scene. EMT Wolfe was able to locate a white piece of paper in the victim’s waistband. He gave the paper to Deputy Brane and I collected it as evidence. The paper was a note the victim had left on her person.”

  I looked through the remainder of the report. The note wasn’t there.

  “Where’s the suicide note?” I asked the records officer.

  “You can’t have it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The case is still open. Detectives are still investigating it for possible criminal charges.”

  Well. Now I was intrigued. I had never come across a suicide that was treated as an open and active investigation. There were, I knew, two possible explanations for this. One: The detectives suspected there was another crime connected to Heather Rausch’s suicide. Two: They were keeping the suicide “open” as a way to keep the suicide note private. In the State of Ohio, many police files can remain secret until a case is officially closed or a suspect is indicted.

  I pushed back as hard as I could. I mailed a new round of official public records requests to Charles Howland, the Morrow County prosecutor. Howland, I learned, had a reputation for disrespecting the First Amendment. A staunch old-school Republican, he never made things easy for the media. For instance, he would not make copies of 911 tapes, insisting reporters listen to the calls and take notes instead. I asked him for a document called a Vaughn Index on the redacted material, which might have forced him to officially explain why he was withholding the records.