Also, Natasha “Knoxy” Horton at Jupiter has been a friend and incredible talent to work with.
To everyone I interviewed and those who helped with documents and other source materials, a big thank-you! Equally, I appreciate James Cargill contacting me and verifying several things.
To my readers: I adore you and thank you for returning, book after book. I am constantly in awe of your dedication. I put my heart and soul into every manuscript and I hear from a lot of you that it is fully appreciated. I am humbled and honored to be able to write these books.
Don’t miss M. William Phelps’s
next compelling real-life thriller
DANGEROUS GROUND
Coming soon from Kensington Publishing Corp.
Keep reading to enjoy a sample excerpt . . .
SHE IS DEAD.
On a metal slab. A sheet covering her body. A tag hanging from her big toe. Soon manner and cause of death will be determined.
Murder by strangulation.
He is, contrarily, alive. Standing in my kitchen.
I walk in.
He appears to be waiting for the ding to tell him the Howard Johnson’s Macaroni & Cheese dinner in the plastic frozen boat he placed inside the microwave has been fully nuked. But I notice the carousel inside the oven is not making that squeaky noise it does when it is on. Also, he is not moving. His head is bowed, as if he’s trying to touch his chin to his chest, the folds of his neck fat exposed like rising dough. His eyes are closed. His right hand is on top of the microwave; his left is by his side. The familiar smelling richness of the melting cheese is not there, and this is an aroma that permeates the kitchen air whenever he cooks this meal. In a strange moment of reflection I don’t see my oldest brother nodded out in a methadone-induced coma while standing erect in front of the microwave, but a corpse—a dead man standing. All he cooks is mac-n-cheese and those baked stuffed clams, full of bread crumbs, in the half shell. He lives off pills, methadone, beer, cheese and gluten.
“Mark?”
He does not answer.
“Mark?”
Nothing.
I toss my keys on the kitchen table. Walk over. Shake him.
It is April 12, 1996. I am twenty-nine, and I am separated from my wife for the past two years. In a few months I will be officially divorced. Nine months from now, on New Year’s Eve, I will be married to a woman I haven’t yet met. Mark is living with me in a house the bank is about to foreclose on; we’re both biding our time, waiting for the sheriff to come and tell us to leave. He has recently split with his “wife,” Diane, who is living in Hartford, Connecticut, on Garden Street, not far from Asylum Hill. A forty-one-year-old woman was murdered the previous year on Huntington Street, just a mile away. Unbeknownst to any of us then, a serial killer is on the loose in the Asylum Hill section of Hartford, plucking women off the street, raping, beating and killing them. Hartford is twelve miles from my house.
Last I hear, thirty-four-year-old Diane (her actual name is Diana, but we all call her Diane) is pregnant. Mark isn’t sure if it is his child—and this tears him apart. He tells me he’s done with her, for good this time. It’s over. Yet, in the twenty years they have been together, we have all heard this a zillion times: after each fight; after each one has had the other arrested; after they hit and scratch and berate each other in front of their kids at retail stores, restaurants and all sorts of other public places.
“Hey, man, wake up,” I say, and shake him again.
Mark is thirty-nine. That’s young, I know, but he looks fifty, maybe older. The life he’s led has taken its toll. “The silent killer,” hepatitis C, is coursing through his veins.
“Mark . . . wake up, man.”
A snotlike length of drool hangs from his mouth.
After he comes to, figures out where he is, acclimates himself to his surroundings as if he is on a boat, trying to manage large swells, he takes his mac-n-cheese and heads down the five flights of stairs to his space in the house. He mumbles something I cannot understand. I can decode what he says about 20 percent of the time. Later on, I will have to clean up after he spills the macaroni all over himself, on his bed, the floor, before passing out again. The used boat his food came in will be on his lap, now an ashtray, and the juxtaposition of the ashes and leftover cheese, a cigarette butt stabbed into a piece of elbow macaroni, will remind me that life is, in the end, about choices.
* * *
Several hours later daylight has given itself to night. Mark is standing in my kitchen again, staring out the window. He is waiting, anxious as each car drives by the house, headlight beams looking like a Hollywood premiere strobing across the greasy wallpaper. He is somewhat coherent. His belly is full of cheese and pasta; the methadone and pills have worn off. After he leaves, it will occur to me that as he stood in the kitchen, an image of his face was reflected in the windowpane as he waited for a ride. I saw myself standing in the same spot, at fifteen years old, waiting for my friend, older and able to buy liquor, to come and pick me up so we could go get loaded.
“Shopping,” he says after I ask where he is going. “A friend is on her way.”
“Don’t come back all drunk and high,” I warn. “I won’t let you in.”
He looks at me. Doesn’t respond. Lifts his cigarette up to his mouth, his fingers stained Listerine-yellow from the nicotine, hep C or both. He inhales deeply, blows what’s left of the smoke at the windowpane, fogging it up.
His disability check and food stamps allow him to feed himself, but he also trades some of the food (or sells the food stamps at a 50 percent loss) for booze and Newports. As a kid l liked the Newport package with the upside-down Nike symbol. But stealing and smoking his cigarettes came with a Tic-Tac–like, cold burn in my lungs, so I wound up switching to Marlboro, which I considered more macho cigarettes, anyway.
He’ll be broke in two days, will be eating my food, calling and begging our mother for money. She’ll give it to him. He’ll buy pills with that money because his methadone is regulated. A taxi—paid for by the state of Connecticut—picks him up every morning, brings him into Hartford and returns him home. At the clinic they give him his dose of “Kool-Aid.” Sometimes he stores up several doses so he can go on a bender. It is a cycle, one we’ve been on most of our lives. No one tries to stop Mark anymore because we can’t.
It is while he is shopping that I get the call—the fucking call that will not be a shock to most in my family, but it will change Mark forever, send him on a new course and initiate a suicide that will take him eight years to complete.
Several days before the call Mark came upstairs. I asked him to sit down. “I need to tell you what I have told you a dozen times since you moved in.” As calm as I could, I explained: “I know that while I am at work, Diane is coming over.” Knowing Diane all my life, I knew she was rummaging through my house, looking for things to pawn or information about me to hold over my head. “I don’t want her in the house. She cannot be in this house.”
He said something about being the older brother, more experienced in life, and how I should respect that. “And you never have. I love her. We’re getting back together.”
It’s hard, however, for me to look up to a man with burn marks all over his chest from nodding out while smoking, all his shirts with tiny burn holes on them, the bed he sleeps in and his sheets the same. He is a man who spends fifteen hours a day basically unconscious, takes opiates and methadone together, while drinking cans of Busch beer, and has not been a father to his three kids since they wore diapers. I love him, but I am perpetually furious with this man. He gave up on life long ago for reasons I do not understand.
For a response I go to my emotional childhood bank and withdraw something our father would have said in this same situation: “But this is my house, Mark. My rules if you want to live here. And I don’t want Diane over here.”
He is nodding as we speak. In and out. His eyes languid, tired, Marty Feldman–bulged. His skin is slithery; the shiny text
ure of a salamander, with a subtle hue of yellow, like a healing bruise, same as the whites of his eyes, a strange, dull urine color. He is sickly-looking, gaunt and emaciated. At times he resembles a Holocaust victim staring back at me through an invisible fence between us. He has an anesthetic smell to him, same as a patient in a hospital.
You walk down into the area of my split-level, ranch-style home, where he lives on the bottom floor, and it reeks of a rich, cigarette-butts-stuffed-inside-a-can-of-beer, stale tar odor that is part of the house forever. He sleeps on one of those pullout couch beds, with the springs that stick into your back. There are empty see-through-orange pill containers all over the place. Beer cans. Dishes. Drinking glasses. Old newspapers. Greyhound racing programs. Pencils. Pens. Two-liter Coke bottles, fruit flies hovering. Cigarette butts. Silver-gray ashes. So many ashes: the remnants of his smoking covers everything, like dust. The carpet around where he sleeps is dirty and worn, same as any runner into a home during winter. There are small burn holes all over the area surrounding his worn Archie Bunker chair, and these look similar to tiny craters on the surface of the moon. I have installed four smoke detectors in an area the size of a one-car garage.
In this moment of our lives, if there is one thing about my brother I can count on, it has to be his predictability. His addiction runs his life and has him on a strict schedule. When we were growing up, and when he lived with Diane and the kids, everything about his life was unpredictable. You never knew what he was going to do next. Here, I can say that with his abnormally and enormously bloated hep C stomach, frail arms and old-man, saggy-skin legs, the wires of his tendons exposed, white fingernails, dry lips, cracking and sometimes bleeding, his greasy black hair from not showering regularly, my brother is, if nothing else, confined to some sort of controlled insanity that only he comprehends.
“Did she kill that man?” I ask after we agree that Diane cannot come into the house ever again.
He stares at me. Looks down at the kitchen table. He knows what I’m talking about.
A few years before this conversation a man was found stabbed to death inside Diane’s vehicle. She had driven him to Hartford on the night he was murdered. It is unclear what happened. He was a man she met at a bar while she was living with my brother at a nearby scuzzy motel. Diane was not in the car at the time the man was murdered, she claimed.
“Not talking about that with you,” he says. “She would never kill anyone.”
Mark leaves to go shopping. I put on some music and try to relax.
The phone rings.
That fucking call.
It’s our other brother, Thomas (whom we call Tommy). He and I are closest in age and get along same as good friends. Tommy lives a few miles away—two of Mark and Diane’s kids live with him. First it was me and my soon-to-be ex-wife; now Tommy is their official foster parent. Mark and Diane’s other child, the oldest, lives with an aunt in a neighboring town.
“She’s dead,” Tommy says. “Strangled to death.”
It doesn’t register. “What do you mean—who’s dead?”
“Just heard. Ma called me. She heard, too. Someone murdered Diane. Where’s Mark?”
“Shopping . . . Shit, dude. Are you sure?”
“Yeah, we’re sure.”
“What are you going to tell the kids?”
“I don’t know.”
* * *
I couldn’t have known at the time, but fifteen years after that phone call, my relationship with a man who had strangled eight women to death would set me on the road to resolving some of the issues I faced when my familial and personal worlds unraveled. That early evening when my brother Tommy called and told me Diane had been murdered was the Phelps family’s introduction to the ripple effect murder would have on all of us forever. Like so many other families I’d become involved with through my work, as murder became part of our lives that night, we would never be the same people.
“You mentioned a little bit about your loss,” my serial killer tells me one day. “A death wakes up the family. Maybe some good can come of it. Maybe a Scared Straight course for the Phelps clan.”
In September 2011, I wrote to this man, one of the nation’s most notable, nicknamed serial killers. My goal at the time was to convince him to act as a consultant, an anonymous profiling source on my Investigation Discovery television series, Dark Minds. Concerned about glorifying his crimes or revictimizing the people he murdered, his identity remained secret throughout his tenure on the series and after. He was known to audiences only as “Raven,” a disguised voice on the telephone explaining what was going through the mind of the serial killers I hunted and profiled each week. But as the series aired and our relationship progressed, something happened.
We became “friends.”
“I can help you look at your sister-in-law’s murder,” he continues, “and offer my understanding. Hard to believe a convicted serial killer has something valuable to say, but what I offer is insight into the mind of how this killer thinks. I see through cases because I have witnessed this kind of evil firsthand, lived with evil twenty-four hours a day.”
I had no idea how to respond to this.
He encouraged me to “listen and learn.”
As we began, the true emotional, physical and spiritual impact this relationship would have on my life, or how his “insight” would affect my everyday thinking, on top of the relationship with my family, was hidden—a series of blows I could have never imagined.
“Sorry for your loss,” he says. “Don’t make excuses for her. She was doing what she wanted to do. We play at a cost. Then someone dies and we look at ourselves for answers.”
My five-year friendship with a serial killer, like my relationship with Mark and Diane, would not only change who I was, but break me.
Despite being diagnosed as mentally challenged, thirty-nine-year-old Cherry Walker moved out of her parents’ house and into a studio apartment in Tyler, Texas, to carve out a life on her own.
The gravel road leading to the dirt path where the body of a woman was found on June 19, 2010.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Just off County Road 2191 in Whitehouse, Texas, a pizza delivery man made a gruesome discovery.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
A section of rolled-up carpet and other items were recovered near the body.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Detectives found the charred remains of personal items that, like the victim’s body, had been lit on fire using an accelerant.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Tire tracks left in the hard red clay and soft dirt proved vital in identifying the last known person to have been with the victim.
(Photos courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
An empty and recently used plastic creamer cup, found between the victim’s legs, was another key piece of evidence.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
On the same path nearby, inside an old car tire, a Styrofoam coffee cup was found, and a scenario began to take shape for investigators.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
After Cherry Walker was reported missing, detectives entered her apartment in search of clues as to what might have happened to her.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Things seem undisturbed inside Cherry Walker’s home, just as she might have left them. No signs were found of a struggle or a crime having taken place there.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Cherry Walker liked to keep her apartment neat and clean. She took great satisfaction in doing routine chores like ironing her clothes and making her bed.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Cherry’s calendar indicated plans to babysit on the day before (and one week after) she was found murdered.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
A stack of DVDs next to Cherry’s TV showed her interest in popular films.
(Photos courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Forty-three-year-old Kim Cargill, a mother of four and licensed vocational nurse, often used Cherry Walker as a babysitter for her young son.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Kim Cargill’s Whitehouse, Texas, home was located about six miles from the site where Cherry Walker’s body was found.
(Photos courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
Smith County Sheriff’s Office investigators obtained a search warrant to examine Kim Cargill’s home. All over her white car, and especially on the door handle, they found extensive black soot—which was also found on the bottom of Cherry Walker’s tennis shoes.
(Photos courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
The tire treads on Kim Cargill’s vehicle matched the imprinted tracks left in the red clay near Cherry Walker’s charred remains.
(Photo courtesy of Smith County Sheriff’s Office)
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