Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  27

  Tyria’s chequered work history was marred by lengthy (if often voluntary) periods of unemployment, but when she did hold down a job, she was generally regarded by employers as a reliable and diligent worker. When problems arose in her work arena, Lee invariably had a hand in them. The trouble at Casa Del Mar was no exception. The spark that ignited the flame came early in September when Lee telephoned to speak to Tyria and was told by the bellman of a new rule forbidding employees to receive personal calls. Lee did not handle this news well at all. Barely pausing for breath, she unleashed an ugly torrent of abuse in his ear. Annoyed, the clerk snapped back at her and promptly hung up. Furiously, Lee punched out the Casa Del Mar’s number again and demanded to be put through to Ty. When the bellman refused, Lee, blithely ignoring the position she was putting Ty in, informed him that she was coming over to the hotel to beat him up. Even more annoyed, the bellman hung up a second time.

  Not to be outdone, Lee dialled the Casa Del Mar back. Tired of the interruptions and sensing her calls would not stop, the bellman connected her with the laundry room. Finally getting Ty, Lee demanded to know who the asshole was she’d been talking to? At that juncture, Tyria also fell something short of a master diplomat. Without stopping to weigh her lover’s complaints, she impetuously rushed out to the lobby. The bellman explained the new rule for which he was not responsible, but Ty launched into a tirade.

  ‘Why are you talking to my woman like that? I’ll kick your ass if you talk to her like that again! I don’t give a shit about any new rule, this could have been an emergency! You put through all my phone calls!’

  The bellman pointed out that he knew it was not an emergency because Lee had already identified herself. Ty resumed her screaming and threatening; soon the bellman had had enough. Furious, he reported her. (Or, as some staff members unsympathetically viewed it, ‘went crying to our supervisor’.)

  The next day was Tyria’s day off, but she showed up as planned for the staff volleyball game. She was kicking back, chatting and puffing on a cigarette when Ahmad Bourbour, the Iranian supervisor, walked in. It struck him immediately that Ty was drunk.

  Ahmad, attractive and dark-complexioned, had always got along well enough with Ty in the past. At one time, they’d been reasonably good buddies and Ahmad had occasionally bought her breakfast or lunch. Both being attracted to women, they’d tease one another when a pretty girl walked by. ‘Tyria, put your tongue back in your mouth!’ Ahmad would say, and she’d make some wisecrack back. But all that camaraderie was forgotten.

  ‘Tyria, I’d like to talk to you. What was the problem with you and Dan?’ he asked her.

  ‘You’re not my fucking boss! I don’t have to fucking talk to you! Mind your own business!’ Tyria retorted.

  The bellman then put in an appearance and he and Ty renewed their bickering. Ahmad instructed Ty to go in his office, which she did. In her eyes, the issue had been settled the night before and there was no reason for Ahmad to get involved and to rehash it. But from Ahmad’s perspective the whole affair looked rather different. Staff problems were his business. He and Ty went back and forth, voices rising, until they were screaming.

  ‘You’re not my boss!’ yelled Tyria.

  ‘For that you’re fired!’ the frustrated and angry Ahmad finally shot back.

  Throwing her cigarette to the floor, Tyria defiantly challenged him: ‘If you’re going to fire me, you’d better have a good fucking reason!’

  With that, she lunged at him across his desk. He was trapped behind it with no avenue of escape when she started pounding on him, pinning him up against the wall and hitting him in the head. At a slender 140 pounds, he was definitely outweighed. But he had the last word. Ty was terminated, and he meant it.

  The rest of the housekeeping staff were shocked by Tyria’s behaviour, although if anyone could take Ahmad on, it would have to have been tough-talking Ty, they agreed. Some, who were not too fond of Ahmad themselves, secretly admired her and wished they’d had her courage. From their safe vantage points, they savoured the whole affair.

  For Ty, however, her outrageous outburst was a short-lived, bittersweet, and ultimately costly victory. 3 September found her unemployed, and genuinely upset about it. She went to Mr Romain to plead her case but did not like what she heard: Ahmad, who had worked at the Casa Del Mar for six years, had been right to fire her, Romain said, backing Ahmad one hundred per cent. Still not satisfied, Ty took her grievances a step further up the ladder, but Mr Bradley didn’t see things her way, either. She’d hit a brick wall.

  In Lee’s mind, the firing of Ty would never be the logical result of flagrant insubordination at her place of work. In Lee’s mind, the facts became mangled. First, it became an issue of sexual harassment because they were lesbians. Second, Lee believed the firing was a mean act of revenge by Ahmad because Ty wouldn’t give him a piece of ass. Ahmad, married or no, may well have cast an eye over some of the female workers but if so, even his adversaries would doubt that Tyria was ever one of them.

  Doubtless coached by Lee in the gentle art of crying lawsuit, Ty threatened to sue. Again revealing shades of Lee’s influence, she snarled a number of ‘I’ll get you!’ style threats at Ahmad. Ahmad took the threats seriously enough to file a police report in Ormond Beach.

  Approximately ten days later, Ty appeared at the Casa Del Mar to return her uniform and to see Sandy. Crossing paths with Ahmad, she allegedly again hissed, ‘I’ll get you!’

  After she left, Sandy and Alzada told Ahmad that Lee said she’d put a hit on him and was going to kill him. They also said Lee was going to kill Paul, another worker, who had bought Ty’s moped from her and angered Lee by paying for it with a cheque instead of cash. Fictional it all may have been, but, shaken, Ahmad returned to the police station and filed yet another report. It wasn’t just himself he was worried about, but his family, his children. He didn’t want them put in jeopardy. And if anything untoward should happen to him, he wanted everyone to know that Lee and Ty were behind it.

  More than anything, he was shocked by the change he’d seen take place in Ty. It was as if she’d plunged downhill. True, she was drinking more heavily than when they’d first met, but all this recent behaviour just didn’t seem like the same girl.

  Worse, it seemed she’d started something with her talk of sexual harassment. Suddenly, other female employees were accusing him of this and that. He felt sure that they’d been egged on by Lee and Ty into trumping up charges against him. It was all ironic, he felt, since the door to housekeeping was always open and he was never alone in there with any of the women. Ultimately, he would move away from all the bad feeling at the Casa Del Mar into a job at another plush oceanside hotel nearby, and try to put it all behind him.

  Unemployed again and unhappily so, Ty’s long-voiced thoughts of moving back to Ohio and into the bosom of her family suddenly had more of a reality to them. Given her general discontent with Lee, maybe she should just pack up and leave? Perhaps now was as good a time as any to make the break?

  While Lee was making forays out on the interstate, Ty drooped around the tiny motel room mulling it over. Besides her periodic walks to the store, she did nothing but think, wait for Lee to come back, and watch TV. Movies, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy. What else was there to do? Pausing for a chat with Mary and Vishnu Harripersaud down at the desk, she told them she’d stopped working at the Casa Del Mar because a man had made a pass at her. She also confided that she was planning to move back to Ohio.

  Lee had a lot on her mind. Nothing triggered her anxiety in quite the same way as the threat of losing Ty, and that fear was once again riding high. With her job gone, Ty’s anchor to Florida had been perilously loosened. And Lee knew it. Ty was going to Ohio and she was going with her, Lee told the Harripersauds.

  That wasn’t what Ty had in mind at all.

  28

  Florida, by virtue of its high population of transients and drifters, is a tough state for crime detection. An almos
t invisible life is there for the asking. Those so inclined can move around virtually faceless and traceless, checking into cheap motels whose business is primarily cash and whose record-keeping is often perfunctory. Such establishments are accustomed to clients whose lives are elliptic. No phone listed in their name. Maybe no driver’s licence. Credit cards? Bank accounts? Forget it. Non-existent citizens, leaving the flimsiest of paper trails.

  People like Lee and Ty are an investigator’s nightmare.

  Ensconced in the Happy Holidays, they were pedestrians in a state on wheels. Lee was a familiar sight, walking off, her wallet wedged, male-style, in her back jeans pocket, and clutching her plastic shopping bag. Because they were usually without transportation, the Harripersauds noted the night Lee showed up in a small, medium-blue car. A two-door, newish model that she said was her father’s and that she’d be driving back to Orlando.

  She kept it just a couple of days, but long enough for the Harripersauds to notice the back licence plate was missing. The car’s arrival came right after Lee put down $100 on the room and promised to come back with more. She’d pulled up in it after dark, high as a kite and clutching $30. By checking their better-than-usual records later, they were sure that night fell between 12 and 18 September.

  Ty had come home to find Lee perched on their bed, sifting through what looked like a collection of someone else’s belongings—a couple of men’s briefcases and boxes of paperwork. Lee was tossing things out as she went.

  Ty listened as she explained away the 1985 Oldsmobile Firenza’s presence, reassuring her nervous lover that she hadn’t done anything to its owner, she’d only taken the car. But later, when Ty was digesting her usual hefty diet of TV, a news report popped up showing pictures of the little blue car and its owner. He’d been found murdered. Stark reality mingled in with the game shows. Dick Humphreys. He brought the horror total to three. Three murders that Ty definitely knew of. Three cars she had seen. It was on the news. She had no choice but to believe it.

  Again, she stayed put. Again, she did nothing.

  Lee could leave nothing to chance. Disposing of Dick Humphreys’ car, she worked deliberately, calculatingly. She removed his old police chief badge from its wallet and tossed both pieces, separately, as hard and far as she could into the bushes lining the roadway.

  She then drove the Firenza some seventy miles north up into southern Lake County. Pulling in off 27 to a desolate stretch known as Boggy Marsh Road, she methodically stripped the car of all her victim’s other possessions. Those that she had not chosen to keep, that is. Things like his ice-scrapers. His maps. His personal and business papers, his warranties. She flung them all into the undergrowth. Dick Humphreys had always enjoyed drawing slowly on a good pipe and he kept it with his tobacco in a nicely sculpted wooden tray up on the dashboard. That went, too.

  Anything that could link the car to the man.

  She peeled a bright yellow Highway Patrol Association sticker from the back bumper, balling it up tightly before she tossed it away. She left the car behind the abandoned Banner service station in Live Oak at the intersection of I-10 and SR 40. But first she took out the Windex she kept in her bag and sprayed, carefully wiping down the car inside and out, meticulously ridding it of tell-tale fingerprints.

  Marion County’s John Tilley had contacted Citrus County’s Jerry Thompson some weeks back and they’d compared notes on the Burress and Spears murders. Tilley had also hooked up with Tom Muck in Pasco County after he read in the FDLE bulletin that Muck’s victim was thought to perhaps be linked to Spears.

  The Citrus and Pasco victims were found naked, which Troy Burress was not, but Tilley, Thompson and Muck thought the link of the small-calibre weapon was worth exploring. All the victims’ bodies were left in remote areas, and in each case there’d been some attempt to cover them up with debris. Spears’ and Burress’s vehicles had been dumped away from their bodies. Muck’s victim had not yet been identified, but again there was no car found close by the body.

  When John Tilley finally met the Citrus investigators in the flesh on 6 September, as they brainstormed, he happened to grab the Peter Siems file and pull it out. It was one of those serendipitous moments. Late that night at home, sifting through the various files with the composite sketch of his Burress suspect, Curtis Blankenship, in hand, Tilley scrutinised the sketches of the two women seen leaving Siems’s car. He was shocked. The sketch of Curtis Blankenship and the sketch of the short woman looked uncannily similar. They had to be the same person. The drawings were almost exactly alike.

  On 11 September, the day Dick Humphreys died, Tilley went back to Orange Springs and re-interviewed the Hewetts about the two people they’d seen leaving Siems’s car back on 4 July. He wanted to check whether they were absolutely sure that the short one was indeed a female. They were. It had been raining, her T-shirt was wet, and they’d been able to see her bra.

  Tilley dug further. The area search around the Sunbird on 4 July had been somewhat limited. Anxious to check out Blankenship further to see if there was any correlation at all with the composites (perhaps it was a man/woman team?), Tilley expanded the search and backtracked, finding the Baileys and the original crash site less than a mile away.

  Ultimately, the explanation for the strikingly similar sketches wasn’t all that mysterious. Forensic sketches do have a tendency to end up looking alike, and that’s what had happened. But no matter. What was important was that Curtis Blankenship’s composite had led Tilley to bring the Siems case into the loop. Every murder bears a signature that defines and ultimately reveals its author. Soon, detectives were playing around with the common denominators and contradictions, with the similarities and differences, and speculating that these homicides of men by the Florida highways were perhaps not isolated incidents. What if they were the work of a single killer?

  Another really solid link between the homicides surfaced after the death of Dick Humphreys on 11 September, which alone bore enough resemblance to Troy Burress’s murder in the same county to raise a red flag.

  Both were white middle-aged men shot with .22 calibre weapons, both their bodies were found in remote spots far away from their vehicles. Dick Humphreys’ pockets were found turned inside out. Troy Burress had been robbed. Unlike some of the others found in more wooded locations, Dick Humphreys’ body had not been covered with debris, but then there was none handy in the sparse terrain, and the remote location in itself could classify as an attempt at concealment.

  The bullets found in Dick Humphreys’ body—.22 calibre, copper-coated, hollow-nosed, with rifling marks made by a 6-right twist firearm—led detectives to wonder if he might have been killed with the same weapon.

  There was another death to fit into the equation. Douglas Giddens’s body had been dumped off a dirt roadway and his car was found near an apartment complex in another part of Marion County. He had been shot in the head and killed by a single bullet from a .38 weapon while sitting in the passenger seat of his own car. A .38 broke the pattern of .22s, but since he owned a .38, there was always the possibility he’d been disarmed and shot with his own gun. Also fitting the pattern, some property had been stolen from his car, his wallet was left nearby, and his car was facing south, backed into a spot.

  (All but two of the vehicles faced south, although no one knew why, or even if it mattered. A clue that could be meaningless—or crucial.)

  Then there had been the mysterious disappearance of Peter Siems, whose wrecked car turned up on 4 July, after being abandoned by two women.

  So it was that at 9.30 a.m. on Monday 17 September, there was the biggest yet brainstorming session at Marion County SO. Clutching their morning coffees, investigators from all territories convened for a meeting of the minds. Besides the Marion County cases of Humphreys, Burress, Siems and Giddens, Pasco County’s homicide of (the still unidentified) Charles Carskaddon and Citrus County’s of David Spears, were also under discussion.

  With remarkably little dissension, serious consider
ation was being given to the controversial theory being floated that the killer (or killers) might be female. Of course the Siems case really highlighted this female turn in the road of investigation. The fact that some of the victims were naked was not in itself that unusual. Nor did it especially suggest gay crimes, females, or even sex crimes. A more common explanation by far was that the killer(s) had merely removed the victims’ clothing to try to avoid detection and to delay identification of the body. Gruesome though it may sound to the layman, the cops knew only too well that murderers frequently go to extreme lengths to achieve that end, sometimes removing a head, hands, or other body parts and scattering them in different locations.

  The investigators also found it interesting that Dick Humphreys’ belongings were scattered on both sides of the road. Had there been two women in his car, perhaps, tossing things to either side simultaneously? Then again, it might easily have been a woman working in tandem with a man.

  It’s a quantum deductive leap to go from suspecting a woman or women of a single homicide, to suggesting there might be a female serial killer (or killers) on the loose. No one took it lightly.

  What nagged at many of the investigators was that these men did not seem easy marks. David Spears was 6 feet 4 inches and not easily overpowered. Investigator Munster couldn’t imagine either Dick Humphreys or Troy Burress being conned by a male hitchhiker, or being kidnapped from a convenience store—a theory at one time tossed around regarding Troy Burress. Dick was very against hitchhiking and wouldn’t pick up anyone with their thumb out. He was not a fearful man and would be difficult to intimidate, and an ex-cop of his experience would never go blindly where he smelled danger. But that didn’t rule out the possibility that he’d fallen for a woman in distress. Both men would stop to help someone in trouble. And that someone could well be a woman.