True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  In the end, Howland must have figured it would just be easier to let me see the damn thing. They provided me with a copy of Heather’s handwritten note. It is a very private document and I will not go into detail. Suffice it to say, there is no connection to Maura Murray. Maura is never mentioned in the note. Most of it centers on Heather’s problems getting proper psychiatric help and instructions about what to do with her remains.

  But what of Dr. Lee’s insistence that Heather had something important to tell the sheriff? I put that question to Sheriff Steven Brenneman. But he said he and his detectives had never heard from her.

  Heather Rausch’s suicide was a curious distraction, but I am convinced it’s a dead end. One of those bad rabbit holes. Some families are magnets for tragedy. It’s been my experience that those who have suffered the most are usually the first ones to suffer again. Luck. Sometimes it’s shitty and that’s the way it is. I cross myself every day, asking for happiness. I never take it for granted, because my family knows about tragedy, too.

  FORTY

  An Overdue Visit

  Here’s my favorite part about what I do. There comes a time in every true crime story where the reporter goes to the bad guy’s house to ask him tough questions. Did you rape this woman? Did you kill this girl? Sometimes, that reporter is the only person who will ever ask those questions, because the police don’t have enough evidence to bring him in. I’ve traveled to poor, flophouse burbs outside Steubenville to locate a serial killer’s nephew so that I could ask him if he’d helped with some of the killings. I’ve been chased out of a used car lot by a man who probably murdered three people. I flew to Key West to confront a man I thought might have taken Amy Mihaljevic.

  I’m not sure why I enjoy these moments. Oftentimes I make these house calls late at night, when no one would be able to see them pull me into their basements. It would be safer during the day, so why do I go at night? It’s the danger, right? I enjoy the look on their face when I ask the question, that moment when the mask breaks in the shock of the confrontation and I get a glimpse of the monster on the other side, the beast that only their victims have ever seen. Some believe these killers are psychological abnormalities. Others believe these people are possessed by demons. Whatever. There’s something very powerful about looking a monster in the eyes and showing it that you’re not afraid.

  One day in the first week of January 2013, I drove into Alliance, Ohio, to knock on a monster’s door. He lived on North Union in this empty steel-mill town, in a tall house surrounded by a tall fence. I knocked on the door and after a few moments, he ambled onto his porch. His mask was nice enough: a pleasant, elderly man’s face; a high widow’s peak; his red hair gone gray; a paunch under his short-sleeve button-up, between brown suspenders.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  He crinkled his eyes and smiled but shook his head. “I should. I know that. I do know you. But I can’t place it.”

  “I’m James Renner,” I said. “Last time you saw me, I was a kid. I grew up and now I’m a writer. I came by to let you know that I’m writing about you on Monday.”

  “You’re Jimmy,” he said, eyes wide now.

  I nodded. “I’m your grandson.”

  * * *

  My uncle Michael contacted me at the end of 2012. I hadn’t seen him in twenty-four years. He found me on Facebook and invited me out for pizza. We met at Luigi’s, in Akron. The dining room was full. He was finally ready to talk about his father and he needed a writer to tell the story. Until that day, I’d heard only snippets of the tale, from my mother, but enough to know my grandfather was a dangerous man.

  For many years, my mom thought her father was dead. Before she was old enough to have many memories of him, he disappeared. She was told that her father had died in a car crash on Seven-Hill Road coming back from the bar. My mother and her three sisters went to live with family on a farm in Charlestown. Then, around 1975, my mom discovered that her old man was alive. He’d actually started a new family in Alliance.

  My aunt—let’s call her Peg—was twelve when she left the farm to stay with my grandfather, Keith Simpkins, in Alliance. He gave Peg her own room and a new bike. She felt like a girl who finds out she’s an orphaned princess. Keith was damn near perfect. Active in the church. A leader in the local Boy Scout troop. A mentor at A.A. Soon, Keith was raping her every day.

  He’d ply her with booze and pot and then tie her to the bed and gag her so that she wouldn’t make a sound. Sometimes it happened after school, but most times it was at night when everyone else was in bed. He’d whistle to himself on the way to her room.

  On Saturdays, he took Peg to Acme Hard Chrome (now Acme Industrial Group, on Freedom Avenue), where he plated metal. He’d rape her in his office. Once, when Peg hosted a birthday party, Keith went after one of her friends. The girl called her parents to pick her up. No charges were filed.

  “I turned him in to the counselor at Stanton Middle,” my aunt recalled. “I showed them the bruises all up and down my thighs. They called him and brought him into the room with me and he denied it. Said I was just a hood kid trying to cause trouble.”

  Peg’s oldest sister—call her Anne—made a pact with Keith: She wouldn’t resist when he raped her so long as he never went after her younger sisters. She didn’t find out until later that he’d lied to her.

  Couple years later, Keith started raping another daughter, “Susan,” too.

  As a kid, I never knew any of this. My mother suspected, but she had no firsthand knowledge—although there was one time when Keith got drunk and told my mother in a low voice how much she looked like my grandma when they were kids. I spent a lot of time at his house on North Union with my little sister. Holidays, mostly. Sundays for football. His kitchen always smelled like sloppy joes and coffee. We were never left alone with him. I still see the layout of his house in my dreams: the framed painting of the praying man in the living room, the Saturday Evening Post in the bathroom upstairs.

  He had a dog that could talk. He did. It said, “Momma,” and “I love you.” Sometimes he would invite the older kids to watch marathons of Rocky movies in the basement where the dog slept. I couldn’t wait for the day when he would invite me down there.

  We were pen pals for a bit. My grandpa was a storyteller. He’d write me long stories, most of them funny, on tall sheets of yellow legal paper, the sort of paper lawyers and reporters use.

  Then one day in 1989, around the time Amy Mihaljevic vanished, my mother told me, simply, that my grandfather was a very evil man and that we would never see him again. Her sisters—my aunts—had finally told each other about the rapes. Some had found the strength to speak out after years of therapy, of A.A. And now their own children were old enough to catch Keith’s eye and there were far too many of us to keep safe. They couldn’t keep it quiet anymore.

  This revelation changed each of us in different ways. Most of us just had this weird empty spot in our family tree that was hard to explain to curious friends. Odd, but nothing tragic. My aunts, though, had to explain to their husbands why they were cutting off contact with their father. That meant taking a good hard look at how fucked up their lives were because of this one man. And they were less able to handle this because of their own alcoholism, drug abuse, and physical deteriorations, all precipitated by Keith’s years of abusing them.

  This revelation caused divorces. Mental breakdowns. A nuclear bomb went off, irradiating fucking everything. And the worst part was that Keith remained unharmed, clean, a respected member of society. He even had the audacity to get sober.

  It directly affected me, too, beginning at age five, when my parents divorced. Years later, my mother would confess that she’d never fought for custody because she was afraid all of this would come out in court.

  And in the quiet, my grandfather never stopped his predations.

  My uncle Michael lived with Keith back then. He was about fourteen and I was seven when I was still going over there regularly. Mich
ael had a STOP sign on his bedroom door that I thought was pretty badass (though now I realize, literally as I’m writing this, how that sign was a not-so-subtle plea to his father). Michael taught me how to play Othello. I thought he was the coolest.

  It was difficult to listen to the stories he told me at Luigi’s that afternoon.

  “His thing was to perform masturbation rituals on me—orally stimulate my penis to force me to have an erection; that’s how he would get me to have anal sex with him,” Michael explained. “His favorite location was in the basement of our house. There was a putrid blanket covered with dog fur he kept in front of the door—that was our dog Rebel’s bed. He would shoo the dog away and want sex there a lot. He concentrated in that area, would venture into my bedroom occasionally when the coast seemed clear. There were times that I knew my mother was in the house upstairs when this was occurring—I believe she was completely aware on some level that this was occurring, but was either too indifferent to my situation or did not feel compelled to intervene.”

  Sometimes, Keith would beat him senseless. That got the old man’s rocks off, too.

  “I’ll never forget the rancid smell of his sweat: cheap hand cream, mingled with acrid smoke of menthol cigarettes he smoked while masturbating. He has a very unusual body mark, or a scar, on the tip of his penis. It was very noticeable when he had an erection and since he frequently stuck it in my mouth,… yeah, I got a good look at it. The scar came out of the hole and down the head—just really weird.

  “I remember being about age fourteen when this was over, when I had considered castrating myself—I think I had the knife ready and was kind of looking for a way to commit suicide. That summer was rough for me, to say the least. I very nearly did it. But my story took a turn for the better—I met a girl and she showed me that I could be loved. She gave her heart to me and when I was with her, I didn’t feel like a freak, I felt good about myself. She was my first love—gets complicated. But, that is the basic narrative.”

  Michael confronted his parents after his second child was born. He told Keith he could still have contact with his grandsons but he would never be alone with them. As crazy as it sounds, he didn’t want to deprive his children of some kind of relationship with his father. Michael’s only condition: Keith had to admit to the abuse. His parents cut off all ties with him instead. Then, a few years ago, Keith sent him a card. He claimed he had stage-four colon cancer and probably wouldn’t live long.

  “Still trying to manipulate me,” said Michael. “Still trying to control the situation, find a way to get me back.”

  * * *

  “What side of the fence are you on?” my grandfather asked me on the porch of his house in Alliance that day.

  I didn’t tell him that my five-month-old daughter inherited his red hair and that I have to think about him every time someone asks about it.

  “You need to go away,” I said. “Someone should have put you away a long time ago. And I’m going to try now. But I was curious if you’d admit it first.”

  “I’ve done some terrible things in my life,” he said. “But I’m in the church. I’m doing better. I’m a better man.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is a bad time for me,” he said.

  “Would there be a good time for this story?”

  “You don’t understand, Jimmy. I just found out I have stage-four colon cancer. I probably don’t have much time left.”

  “Would you do me a favor?” I asked. “Please write down everything you did so we have it when you’re dead.”

  He nodded. “I’ve written some things already.”

  * * *

  After I wrote about my grandfather’s crimes, my aunt contacted a police detective and tried to press charges. But Ohio’s conservative congress has put restrictions on prosecuting rape cases—you’ve got to file within twenty years. Here’s the thing, though—rapists screw up their victims so much that it usually takes more than twenty years to get healthy enough to talk about it. Even Michael’s assaults occurred beyond the twenty-year threshold.

  Over those years, Keith had maintained contact with some of his children. And their children. And though they took precautions to protect their own kids, no one in the family believes he ever stopped his predations.

  My grandfather exhibited a very special and rare combination of behaviors that are shared by the killers I like to hunt. He’s a sexual sadist who enjoys not just the control he has over his victims, but also the physical pain he administers through beatings. He’s highly intelligent and organized. And he knows how to manipulate children.

  After I wrote a story about the decades of abuse and posted it on my blog, I heard from a number of parishioners from his church. Keith, they told me, was a friendly guy, not the sort who would do something so depraved. Why, he always invited the children to the kitchen in the basement for ice cream after mass.

  Sometimes, the best you can do is knock on the monster’s door and tell him you know what he did. And then write about it.

  FORTY-ONE

  Outliers

  I have this theory, something I’ve noticed while studying unsolved abductions and murders: It takes an uncommon mind to commit an uncommon crime. These people, these killers and scoundrels, are outliers, citizens whose routines fall outside society’s average behavior.

  Example: my favorite suspect in the murder of Amy Mihaljevic. He was a middle school science teacher, but far from “average” in his field. He kept a small zoo in his classroom. He was voted Teacher of the Year. He played ragtime piano. He’d once taken two years off from teaching. For those two years, he wandered the country, working briefly at Disneyland. He had a sister who died of polio when they were prepubescent kids. Nothing about this man’s life was average.

  Kate Markopoulos, Maura’s friend, is an outlier. One of my Irregulars pointed me to some old newspapers from upstate New York, articles that gave Kate a very unique backstory. You see, in 1995, Kate’s father tried to blow up his neighbor with a homemade bomb.

  This was in Porter Corners, an isolated suburb of Saratoga Springs. The Markopoulos family lived on a private road and shared a driveway with the Finamores, who had a daughter in high school about Kate’s age. Daniel, Kate’s father, was a hunter who killed game for food. He was also handy with explosives, known for making his own black-powder bombs, which he used to destroy stumps in his backyard. In the winter, Daniel plowed Hall Road for his neighbors. But then he started bickering with Steven Finamore about property lines and the animosity boiled over into Hatfield and McCoy territory.

  On September 30, 1995, someone left a bomb with a mercury-switch trigger beside Finamore’s garage door. When Steven Finamore picked it up, it exploded in his face. His daughter, Annemarie, found him moments later, covered in blood. The explosion left him blind in one eye and with only partial sight in the other.

  At first, Daniel Markopoulos told local reporters he had nothing to do with the explosion, and expressed concern that there might be some madman out there trying to blow people up. But when questioned by state police tech sergeant John Curry, he admitted to making a bomb, though he insisted the one he’d constructed was left in the woods and couldn’t be the one that hurt Steve Finamore. Still, Daniel readily admitted that he would have liked to kill Finamore if given the chance.

  “As we got in the bomb conversation, he indicated he didn’t like Mr. Finamore to the point where he would kill Mr. Finamore, but he would never do it with a bomb,” Curry said during testimony.

  Judge James Nichols tried to bar reporters from covering the case, stating that he was concerned about the effect the publicity might have on Daniel’s daughter Kate, according to articles published in Albany’s Times Union.

  Eventually, Markopoulos pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a dangerous weapon. “Daniel J. Markopoulos single-handedly changed the course of two families’ lives,” Steven’s wife, Diane, said in her victim impact statement. “He never took into account the outcom
e of his actions, only whatever was in his twisted mind, with no respect to the cost to others, even his own family. He is a liar and a coward.” Daniel was sentenced to three to six years in prison, and was released in 2000.

  Since our first conversation, I felt that Kate was being evasive about what she knew about the days leading up to Maura’s disappearance. She claimed to have forgotten the names of everyone present at the dorm party the night Maura wrecked her father’s car. Was the evasiveness I sensed just the fear that someone would uncover this frightening bit of family history?

  I called Kate and asked her about all this, gave her another opportunity to explain her strange reactions. “My father didn’t do it,” was all she said. “He was wrongfully imprisoned.”

  Not everyone with a shady family history should be looked on with suspicion. My grandfather was one of the most prolific rapists in Ohio. Should his behavior cast a shadow over me? It certainly influenced me, didn’t it—I’ve spent a good part of my life tracking down men just like him. But no, the story of Kate’s father didn’t prove anything.

  Still, it was odd. It was very odd.

  FORTY-TWO

  More Trouble in St. Albans

  I’ve never been able to track down Kathleen, Maura’s older sister, and I’m pretty good at tracking people down. She’s an important source. When Maura was found catatonic at Melville Hall, she had muttered, “My sister.” Since she had spoken to Kathleen that night, police assumed that “my sister” meant Kathleen and not Julie. When detectives asked Kathleen about the nature of the phone call, she said she had told Maura about a fight with her husband, Tim Carpenter.

  A cop in Hanson suggested I make public records requests in northern Vermont, and that’s how I eventually found Kathleen’s trail.

  On the banks of Lake Champlain near the Canadian border is a town called Swanton. It’s one of those border towns that can’t make up its mind what it wants to be, a mixture of French Canadian, Native American, and rugged U.S.A. mountainmen. I hate places like this. Makes me paranoid. Everything is familiar and yet nothing feels the same.