by Noel Hynd
The A.G. back to his boss: “. . . proceeding with every priority of this office . . . You will not be disappointed in the final ajudication of the case. . . .”
“Ajudication.” [Sic.] Seven years of the best higher education in this state and Benny Boy still couldn't string together the proper letters to master a five-syllable word. Who expected literacy out of high-school kids these days when law-school graduates couldn't spell?
And, returning to the larger issues, what the hell were these letters all about? Since when did the governor set up a private cheering section in a homicide prosecution?
O'Hara waded through more correspondence. An angry memo from the governor about the troublesome opinions of one “JS” in the case and how the opinions of '3s” could be shelved.
O'Hara, piqued, wondered: Who the hell was J.S.?
O'Hara ran the initials through his memory of the case. Prosecutors, legal aide mouthpieces. Cops and family members. Witnesses. No goddam J.S. anywhere in sight.
And where had he seen a stray initial or initials before? He placed it. “S. Clay.” The name on the storage unit. A Gary pseudonym?
It's me, man.
“What's you?”
S. Clay. It's me and it's not me. Okay?
O'Hara's voice was a whisper again. “Explain it to me. 'S. Clay'?”
You figure it out. You're the genius.
O'Hara racked his brain. S. Clay receded and J.S. came forth.
Seven years ago. Who was O'Hara forgetting?
Whoever the troublemaker had been, the J.S. who had gotten under Ashton's skin, O'Hara reckoned as he slowly turned over more pages, the snotty, little A.G. seemed to have successfully dealt with him. J.S. had probably been fired by now. A final memo to the governor, marked “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL,” on Ashton's stationery made matters clear.
“. . . opinion of JS has been dismissed and replaced with a more favorable summation of details re Ledbetter,” the semiliterate Ashton had written. '3s has been advised that JS opinions show lack of mature judgment, are marked by inexperience and are of no value to the prosecution and conclusion of said case and that their will be reprecussions upon JS's continued employment by the state if JS in any way damages final disposition of the case.”
The Attorney General was so pleased with himself that he took the liberty of signing the letter, “Ben,” a conspicuous break from previous signatures which included his surname. There was almost an insinuation that he had done the governor some sort of service.
And curiously, at the bottom, was a handwritten postscript from Ashton.
“This is the type of shit,” Ashton's note read, “that we get into with affirmative action hiring.” The A.G. was so bright that he didn't even know enough not to put such thoughts in his own handwriting. O'Hara sighed. He no longer wondered how Ashton had graduated from law school; he wondered how he had successfully completed sixth grade.
Then O'Hara was abruptly jarred back to the present day. There was a series of loud reports beyond the concrete wall of Central Records, followed by a second and third burst. O'Hara's head came up with a snap. His heartbeat accelerated. He was reminded of those naval shore patrols along the Mekong.
Gunfire! Several seconds passed as he placed it. Then he calmed. Slowly.
The sound came from the target range next door. O'Hara listened again. Someone, with great enthusiasm, was blasting away with some new grossly overpowered automatic weapon. New issue. Just testing. Tactical heavy weapons. The rounds had obviously smashed through the regular targets, passed through the bales of hay behind the targets, and were smacking up against the seven feet of concrete. Some of his peers would have been happy with howitzers in every cop car. New Hampshire staties used to spend their time dragging the cars of drunken skiers out of ditches. Now all anyone could think about was how the county roads could turn into miniatures of Medellin, Columbia, or the back streets of the cities could turn into downtown Beirut any week now. Snow wasn't the only white powder that brought death to the state.
O'Hara drew a breath and returned to the present.
Didn't do it, man. Can't you see?
“I don't see anything yet, Gary,” O'Hara said aloud.
Also in Envelope Thirteen was a bio of Gary Ledbetter, an embellishment on the material put together by O'Hara seven years earlier. The bio was in several different sections compiled by various police agencies. Much old stuff. But O'Hara had never seen this.
O'Hara scanned.
Ledbetter: Lower-class white family. Three children. Fundamentalist Christian mother. Abusive alcoholic father, then absentee father. School? Yeah, occasionally Gary dropped by academia from time to time when he felt like it or maybe when he was hiding out from his old man. Never passed a grade after seventh. Family moved several times across the South. Brother died in car accident. Sister left the family. For Gary, Henderson Juvenile Correctional Facility in Charleston, South Carolina, at age sixteen for ten months, a finishing school for tough boys who wanted to be tougher. They were after a few weeks at Henderson.
One Grand Larceny, Auto: Atlanta, 1980. The GLA was hitched to a felonious assault rap, charges dismissed when the owner, a man in his sixties, dropped the charges. Said he'd “given” Gary the keys to his BMW and had asked for some rough stuff while they drove around. Apparently Gary had gotten out of hand and had shoved the old dude out of the car at a traffic light then took off down Peachtree in his new Beemer.
O'Hara's brow furrowed. Now here was stuff about Gary that O'Hara had never seen. Reading between the lines, it looked like a fag encounter, an old guy with an expensive ragtop who liked to pick up rough trade. Was that it? That's how it read to O'Hara: An old queen looking for a hard, young bugger. Had the old guy picked up a street punk and things got out of hand?
Two other arrests. Both in 1982. Assaults. Male victims. What the hell? O'Hara thought again. He had never seen any of this stuff. Nor, he reminded himself, would he have had any occasion to. The case had been whisked away from him five weeks after the arrest.
O'Hara kept reading. Gary had done two short stretches in county jails. Six weeks here. Thirty days there. He had finished a high-school correspondence course, joined the Army, and had been booted out of the service almost as fast. June 1983.A three-month enlistment ending in a dishonorable discharge.
Someone had placed a copy of Ledbetter's dishonorable discharge in the file. “Moral turpitude,” the document said. Again, what the hell was going on here? The term was normally used for homosexual activity, O'Hara reasoned, and at no time had Gary Ledbetter been identified as gay.
Was he? Or had he just hustled gay men? The latter fit better than the former, based on what O'Hara knew.
Yet as O'Hara prowled through the paperwork on the executed man, such questions began to grab the detective by the lapels.
O'Hara was getting into the mood. He reached for more. Envelope Fourteen was marked “Serial Killers: Psychological Profiles.” He grabbed that next.
O’Hara opened it. He found a composite of opinions contrived by various doctors on the state payroll. Outlines of social portraits of one of America's sexually homicidal male citizens. He spent half an hour picking through opinions that were both lurid and clinical.
It all seemed to point in the same direction. Some of the more memorable stuff stood out. O'Hara read carefully.
“Ledbetter is a 'lust killer,’” wrote a psychiatrist named Richard Hawkins, who-judging by the expensive stationery apparently had a booming private practice in Concord.
Obviously sexual oppression and confusion contributed to Ledbetter's mental state. Most lust killers cannot comprehend the act of sex with a live, functioning woman. A dead body poses no threat. This is coupled with a tremendous rage toward women, a feeling that a certain female is not “female enough” to turn him on.
O'Hara drew a breath and forged ahead. The psychiatrist offered an aside that if you got past the dirtball veneer, Ledbetter resembled Ted Bundy in his psychological profile
.
A handsome, intelligent, one-time law student who carried on several successful nonviolent liaisons with women and actually wrote a rape-crisis manual. But even Bundy became a necrophile in the end.
Perfect twenty-twenty hindsight, O'Hara noted. A diagnosis to fit the apparent findings. Thank you Dr. Hawkins for your regurgitation of what's already known and your lack of insight. A few minutes later, O'Hara focused upon the ruminations of Edward Diehl, M.D., writing from his observation post as Chairman Emeritus of the Psychiatry Department at the State of New Hampshire loony bin at Manchester. Dr. Diehl, after all those years in the public nut house, was probably a pretty wild and crazy guy, himself. And naturally he had some opinions.
Once the killer sees that these women will comply with his deviant demands, even forcibly, he concludes that this nice girl is no more than a whore. Less than a human being, she deserves to die. The dismemberment that occurs after the homicide is a mental effort to both commit suicide himself and obliterate the truth of what he himself has done.
O'Hara curled a lip and continued. Dr. Diehl wrote with perhaps too much glee.
Killing, sex, and mutilation are inextricably bound! Assuredly, Ledbetter nurtured sexually charged homicidal fantasies for years before engaging in his first murder. It can take years before a killer can overcome societal restraints and his own inhibitions to enact his private horror. Killers thus often begin with petty crimes, simple assaults, while keeping up the appearance of a normal life-the very traits that lure unsuspecting female victims.
O'Hara looked for dates when the various doctors had examined the patient. Again, the file was incomplete. He found no references to time or venue of patient interviews. And, maddeningly, the shrink profiles were to be continued in Envelope Fifteen. Reaching for it, he found it was empty. Had someone made off with its contents for private amusement? Or was its absence part of something larger?
Then again, stepping back from the matter at hand, how could the Ledbetter case have been part of anything larger? O'Hara went back to his own discovery of fingerprints. Witness IDS. Gary's refusal to offer anything resembling a coherent alibi.
Not guilty, man. I keep telling you.
O'Hara, speaking aloud in the empty room, another rumble of gunshots behind him: “Then why couldn't you account for your time, Gary? Why were your fingerprints all over those rosewood boxes? Why did witnesses identify you with Karen Stoner? And with the girl in Florida? Tell me that, Gary?”
Lies. All lies.
Even in death, Ledbetter could resemble a broken record. Like O'Hara's nervous finger on the reading table, Gary tediously kept tapping on the same point.
“Sure, Gary.”
Hell! You're the detective. You find out!
O'Hara glanced at his watch. He had been in Central Records for more than an hour. Time to take final inventory and wrap up. He glanced for anything he might have missed. He reexamined some of the earlier envelopes, those containing the evidence he had accumulated himself seven years earlier. He looked for anything he might have forgotten.
Then he found something. It was a correspondence on the stationery of a private psychiatric hospital in Concord, addressed to Benjamin Ashton, Attorney General, State of New Hampshire. The letter was misfiled, having been stuck in with documents that O'Hara had turned over to the A.G. Me glared at it with surprise, then began to examine it. Clearly, it should have been filed with the shrink reports that were in the higher numbered envelopes. And-more sloppiness on the part of Ashton-it was perhaps this misfiling that had spared the document. Otherwise, O'Hara began to suspect, it probably would have been destroyed.
From the opening line, O'Hara knew he was in the presence of an intellect. And a troublemaker. This doctor wrote:
I must call your attention to the inaccuracies and misinterpretations contained in previous analyses of patient and NH Dept./Correct. #87-2634. I must equally take issue with almost all of the conclusions previously drawn on patient Ledbetter's case.
O'Hara settled in, leaning back in his chair, and holding the two-page letter in his hand. This doctor had started with an identical background analysis of Ledbetter, but had come away with different conclusions.
Mr. Ledbetter does not fit the profile of a heterosexual serial killer. Nor does he even fit the profile of a heterosexual. Under several hours of questioning, Mr. Ledbetter conveyed great empathy for his alleged victims, even an association with them. . . . Rather than a deep hatred toward females, Ledbetter almost seems afraid of them.
The empathy, O'Hara learned as he continued to read, was in direct contradiction of traditional serial killer psychology. So was the absence of hatred for the victims. Of course, O'Hara reasoned, this doctor's evaluation could have been wrong. But it sounded good, so O'Hara pursued it. The doctor then moved to Gary Ledbetter's overall sexual orientation and saw fit to include a section of a patient interview:
Doctor: Gary, are you more comfortable with men than women?
G.L.: Yeah, you know. Somewhat, I guess.
Doctor: Are you gay, Gary?
G.L. : I don't know sometimes.
Doctor: You must know. What's in your heart?
G.L.: (Doesn't respond.)
Doctor: You can tell me, Gary.
G.L.: (mumbles) . . . lot of things in my heart.
Doctor: Sadness?
G.L.: Yeah, sadness.
Doctor: Over what you've done?
G.L.: No, on account of what I seen. I ain't done nothing bad, me personally. Doctor: Then what have you seen?
G.L.: I seen the real horror of this world, Doc. And if they're going to kill me for doing it, they're wrong, but they're probably going to kill me, anyways. See, I shot me a New Hampshire hound dog one time 'cause it was doing all this here barking when I was trying to sleep. But I didn't kill no girl.
Doctor: Do you know who did?
G.L.: (Declines to answer.)
Doctor: Do you know who did?
G.L.: What's it matter? I ain't no squealer.
Doctor: It 's very important.
G.L.: (very angry) I said I ain't no squealer.
The interview began to resemble O'Hara's own questioning of the suspect, though the doctor noted that Ledbetter was particularly difficult when he did not wish to reveal something intensely personal. One such exchange:
Doctor: Gary, you become very defensive on certain subjects. Why is that?
G.L.: (exhibits anger) 'Cause you 're asking things that 's no business of anyone's but mine. I'd take my own personal business to the grave with me, I would, rather than air it all out in public!
Doctor: Wouldn't that be foolish, Gary?
G.L.: (still angry) A man 's got his pride. That's how I am! I got my personal honor even if you people are fixing to kill me.
Eventually, the doctor risked another display of anger by returning to Gary's own sexual orientation. The doctor asked again if the patient were gay.
The doctor wrote:
The patient flirted with an admission several times, then withdrew. I didn't push him harder because to evoke his anger again would be counterproductive. I felt he had tacitly admitted his homosexuality. . . .
O'Hara continued to read until he reached the doctor's summary on the third and final page of the memo:
Serial killers of women can gratify their desires only after the women are bound, unconscious, or dead. If this patient is a gay man involved in the serial murder of women, he would be the first such known case in the United States. . . . This is one of the many incongruities between Ledbetter's psychological makeup and the crime of which he is accused. . . . I urge further evaluation to discover if this patient actually possessed the neurotic disorientation that would have led him to participate in the Karen Stoner murder. My interviews to date raise troubling questions. I request more time to evaluate. . . .
The time wasn't forthcoming nor was much else for this doctor other than a firm rebuke. This was Dr. J.S. at the doctor's troublesome, meddlesome worst, throwing
a potential damper upon the State's explanation-and prosecution-of Gary. There was no interest from the attorney general in hearing tunes that he hadn't requested, and the governor wasn't buying it, either.
Hence the state police-particularly O'Hara, the arresting officer-weren't even brought into the larger picture: Even though the evidence pointed to Ledbetter as the lone ax murderer, the loony bin profiles on Gary were casting some disturbing shadows over the case.
Hence, the A.G.'s impatience with J.S. Hence, his desire to get this meddlesome doctor out of the picture. And yet Ben Ashton hadn't even been competent enough to cleanse the files of all the communication.
O'Hara stared at the date of the correspondence. March 12, 1987. Then his eyes widened when they hit the finish line, the signature at the bottom of the letter.
The nuisance: J.S.
Dr. Julie Steinberg.
Probably twenty-four years old at the time, fresh out of Boston grad school, and brimming with fresh textbook knowledge and irreverent interpretations of traditional nut cases. Worse, here she had been a young woman about to mess up the State's most high-profile case. Truth was, O'Hara recalled from one of Ashton's references, the State hadn't even wanted to hire her in the first place.
O'Hara wished to hell someone had told him at the time. Failing that, it would have been nice if someone had tipped him over the ensuing eighty months.