The Murder Artist

by John Case

  But he is real. He’s a man who lives somewhere, who buys groceries, drives a car, wears a particular kind of socks… and he kidnapped my sons. Since I don’t know enough about him to have a real image of him, I have to concentrate on what I do know. And on what he did. He took my kids and he had a reason for it.

  MOTIVE, I write at the top of my yellow pad. And then I think about the possibilities.

  Profit? The absence of a ransom note would seem to rule that out.

  Retaliation? Did someone abduct the boys in retaliation against me, for some story I did? True, my work put me in contact with some bad people, but Shoffler looked into this angle and ended up discounting it. In revenge crimes, the perpetrator almost always sends a signal to let the victim know. The “smirk factor,” Shoffler called it. “This guy’s real cute – with the T-shirt and the phone call and all that, but we still got no smirk factor. If the guy getting even with you doesn’t let you know he’s settled the score, where’s his satisfaction?” Shoffler and I worked at it, trying to connect the clues the Piper left behind with one of the investigations I’ve done, but there didn’t seem to be any connection.

  Sexual predator? This is the default position, but I don’t really buy it. Why grab two kids – which would only make the abduction more difficult? And then – why return with them to the house, why call my cell phone, why deliberately confuse matters with the bloody T-shirt? Sexual predators are impulsive and opportunistic. Or so they say. Going back to the house, leaving mementos – that was premeditated. Not a classic pattern.

  Kiddie porn? Cute blond twins. Were they abducted by a ring to make a film or procured for sale to someone with a twin thing? Shoffler looked into this – hard – but it didn’t go anywhere. For one thing, most children caught up in the murky world of kiddie porn are not abducted but “purchased” from relatives or foster parents. And a high-profile kidnapping that was sure to provoke a storm of media attention was unlikely in a subculture that preferred the darkest corners. Still…

  Religious wacko? There was really nothing to suggest that.

  Medical experiment? Shoffler rejected the Dr. Mengele Theory on the basis that there were virtually no cases on the books of pairs of twins going missing. But suppose Kevin and Sean were the initial pair?

  I sit for a long time trying to think of other possibilities. In this world of delayed childbearing and infertile couples, it’s conceivable that the boys were abducted by someone desperate for children. Someone stalking the fair, who saw his chance and went for it. I mull this over for a while, the idea of an obsessed wannabe parent.

  Whoever it was, he or she would have to be a total recluse, living outside of society – because there’s been no credible sighting of the boys since the day they were abducted. And what about the dimes? The T-shirt? The phone call? How would any of that fit into the would-be parent scenario?

  A recluse. An obvious thought occurs to me, but one that never occurred to me before. Unlike Elizabeth Smart, there’s no way someone could wander around with identical twins in tow, not without arousing suspicion. So wherever they are, whoever’s got them, if the boys are alive, Kevin and Sean are hidden from view, isolated.

  I glance over my list of possible motives: profit, retaliation, sexual predator, kiddie porn, religious whack-job, Dr. Mengele, wannabe parent. Stripped down like this, the bare list gives me a chill. The least terrifying motives suggest reckless lunacy; the most alarming are truly evil.

  I take a deep breath. Beneath the list of motives, I write a second word: CLUES.

  Origami rabbit.

  Chicken blood.

  Row of dimes.

  The abductor’s mementos. Judy Jones established that the rabbit was folded of standard material, bore no fingerprints, was of high-intermediate difficulty. And that was about it.

  Still, The Piper left the thing on Sean’s side of the dresser. Why?

  The chicken blood. It was possible that the blood-soaked T-shirt was a ruse to focus suspicion on me, but that was only an assumption. The chicken blood might have some other meaning. The police lab did establish that the blood came from a breed of chicken common in the commercial poultry business.

  The dimes. The lab checked them for prints and struck out. There was also an attempt to source them – but it turned out that although you don’t see many “Mercury” dimes in circulation, there are millions of them out there. They were minted for almost thirty years, from 1916 to 1945, at which point the FDR dime replaced the Liberty head design. The police and the FBI had also looked into mint marks, and the dates of the coins left by the abductor, but there was no discernible pattern.

  Still, the coins were placed deliberately; the Piper took the trouble to line them up. They must have some meaning.

  There are other clues. For instance, the dog. The Piper used the cute little dog as a kid magnet. Shoffler checked into whippets and told us that the breed was rising in popularity. Lots of whippets out there. But how many can there really be? I never see whippets out for a walk.

  And then there’s The Piper himself – his costume. Was that just a disguise, or did it, too, have meaning? I needed to check into the fairy tale of the Pied Piper. And what about the costume – where do you go for Piper gear? I got just a glance, but it seemed pretty elaborate. And what about the ruffs? One for him, one for the dog. Where do you buy a ruff? Did Shoffler check that out? And if so, what did he find out?

  Under CLUES, I add:

  whippet

  Piper: fairy tale

  costume

  ruff

  I’m going to need a look at Shoffler’s files. Only I guess they’d be Muriel Petrich’s files now.

  I pick up the phone and call Petrich. She’s not in. I leave a message and try her home number. Instead of a crisp message or the voice-mail robot, I hear a young child’s voice, a child who has trouble pronouncing the letter R. “Hi, you’ve weached the home of Petew, Muwiel, and Bwittany. If…”

  The sound of the little girl’s voice, so sweet and vulnerable and proud of herself, is more than I can handle. It’s like stepping off a cliff. What I’ve lost. I hang up.

  I have an impulse to call Petrich back. I want to tell her to get the kid’s voice off the voice mail. As she would know, anyone can get the address from a criss-cross directory. Is she crazy? Advertising to random callers that there’s a child in the house?

  I take a deep breath, retreat from my impulse and my proxy vigilance. Despite her job, Petrich still lives in a world that seems like a friendly place. She knows – but she doesn’t know, not really – that it can all evaporate in an instant.

  CHAPTER 15

  It doesn’t make sense to get into the dimes or origami without at least looking at the police files first to see what they’ve got. So until Petrich gets back to me, I hit the Internet.

  And once again, I descend into the world of missing children. I’ve been to a lot of the sites dealing with abducted children before; maybe there’s something I’ve missed, some angle I’ve overlooked.

  I’m back in Milk Carton Land, accompanied by sidebar ads for private eyes who suggest they can find the missing children. I’m engulfed by the faces of the vanished – including the smiling faces of Kevin and Sean.

  I correct myself. No one “vanishes.” It’s not a magic act. These kids were abducted. The man who went to the Renaissance Faire dressed up as the Pied Piper is the one who ripped my sons out of my life… and into his world. And I’m going to find out who he is and why he did it.

  I visit a website maintained by the IRE – an organization of investigative reporters and editors. At first, it doesn’t seem relevant. Most of the database on kidnappings concerns the online world – as in “Dangers of the Internet.” There are dozens of stories about intrepid cops and FBI agents working stings in chat rooms.

  But this can’t have anything to do with my kids. Some six-year-olds have amazing computer skills, but not Kevin and Sean, whose access to computers is strictly controlled by Liz. Anyway
, they’re just learning how to read; they don’t know how to spell or type. There’s no way they could get into a chat room, let alone make some kind of arrangement to meet a stranger.

  But some of the articles in the IRE’s archives scare the hell out of me. One concerns a churchgoing couple who ran a “foster home” in rural Illinois – from which they sold children to pedophiles. Another is about some killer nerds in Idaho who abducted a ten-year-old with the intention of making a snuff flick. It’s one nightmare after another, each one darker than the one before.

  A second site reminds me that there are fewer than one hundred kidnappings by strangers each year and that small children are not the usual targets. Teenagers are. Girls older than twelve make up more than half the cases. I scan through the dozens of websites that one of my search requests prompts, each representing a missing child. It’s depressing, clicking through this forlorn catalog of faces. And the websites themselves seem remote outposts in the vastness of the world, like the photos on milk cartons: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

  Shots in the dark.

  The sites for certain children – findkevinandsean.com is one of them, I’m glad to see – surface over and over again while I browse. There are also paid ads for missing children that show up on the right of my screen. I make a note to check with Ezra, my computer-genius friend. How much does that kind of thing cost? Now that the boys are relegated to the occasional news update, maybe a paid ad connected to search terms such as “abducted child” would be worthwhile.

  And maybe it’s time, after all, to get a PR person. Someone who might line up a special on 20/20 or Dateline, keep the boys in the news. The Smart family managed this after their daughter had been missing for several months, an hour-long special flooded with images of their missing child. The special, which I watched at the behest of Claire Carosella from the Center, made it clear that the police had fastened their attention on a handyman, an ex-con who died several months after the kidnapping. It was a believable theory, bolstered by some suggestive evidence about a car – although the dead man’s wife insisted on his innocence.

  Even with the suspected man dead, the Smart family continued to lobby for attention to their daughter’s case. Maybe they were just hoping to find her remains, but there was a lesson to be learned. Don’t get too tied to a theory.

  On an impulse, I plug twins into the search field along with a couple of my other key words: abduction, missing, disappeared, children.

  Google kicks out more than a hundred thousand sites.

  I specify missing twins. Still more than thirty-three thousand listings. I scroll through for twenty minutes or so, only to learn that virtually all of the stories are about Kevin and Sean.

  I log on to Lexis/Nexis, using my password from the station. I enter the search terms missing twins and restrict the search to news stories published before the date of the boys’ abduction.

  The list includes more than a thousand stories, but once I get into it, I see that in real terms there are only three stories about abducted twins.

  The Ramirez boys. The press raised this case within hours of the story about Kevin and Sean breaking because the similarities were so striking. Julio and Wilson Ramirez were abducted from a rec-center gymnastics class in West L.A. Not only were the Ramirez boys identical twins, but at the time they were abducted, they were seven years old – almost the same age as Kevin and Sean.

  I thought of them in the very first hour of this nightmare, sitting on Gary Prebble’s bench outside Faire Security.

  It happened just about a couple of years ago. The boys disappeared and there was a massive hunt – although not so massive as to keep criticism from surfacing about how much greater the effort would have been if they’d been Anglo kids.

  Three months after their disappearance, the killer was caught red-handed, so to speak. He was apprehended at a ramshackle cabin in the mountains not too far from Big Sur. The bodies of the dead boys were found at the cabin – one in his refrigerator, neatly packaged like cuts from a side of beef, the other suspended in a well shaft. The killer was taken into custody and promptly identified himself to the authorities. He turned out to be Charley Vermillion, a sexual psychopath who’d been released from a Louisiana loony bin about a month prior to the boys’ disappearance. Vermillion was cuffed and Mirandized and slapped into a squad car. But before the squad car made it to the local lockup, he was dead, having chewed a cyanide capsule he’d taped under the collar of his shirt.

  So the Ramirez case was closed, and with the perp dead, there wasn’t any way it could be relevant to my boys. Thank God. Both the FBI and Ray Shoffler explored the notion of a copycat crime – but it didn’t go anywhere.

  The second set of sites involves the Gabler twins. This is a false hit, though, because the Gablers were women – and Vegas showgirls, at that. The story showed up because one of my search terms was children and the newspapers reported that the Gablers had recently appeared in a musical revue at a place called the Blue Parrot. The revue was called Children of the Future.

  They disappeared about three years ago and turned up a month later, their decomposing bodies recovered in the usual “rugged area” twenty miles outside Vegas. The press photos show the Gabler twins alive, side by side in skimpy costumes, their long legs in fishnet stockings, smiling faces encased in futuristic headdresses. It’s hard to see how they could possibly have any connection to my boys.

  Which leaves the Sandling twins: Chandler and Connor. I’m familiar with this one, too – the one with the happy ending. The way I remember it, the mother was implicated in the abduction of her kids – although never prosecuted, as I recall. There was something about a boyfriend, too.

  Because of the mother’s alleged involvement, I never really focused on the case. I’m willing to take a second look now, because it’s just occurred to me: Who else do I know wrongly suspected in the disappearance of his children?

  I take a look. Initially, it’s as I remember. Unlike me, Emma Sandling was not an upstanding member of the community but a vagabond for whom “unconventional lifestyle” would be an understatement. A heroin addict who’d been through countless rehab programs, she wasn’t much of a mother. Her kids were often cared for by friends or relatives, and they’d been in foster homes more than once.

  Some of the news stories mention an incident connected to one of Connor and Chandler’s foster-home stays; terming it “the first abduction.” Reading on, I decide that calling that incident an abduction is unfair, a major (and misleading) exaggeration. It seems to boil down to Emma Sandling’s having returned the boys a couple of days late from an authorized visit – due, she contended, to car trouble.

  Then there was the “live-in boyfriend,” plus the fact that at the time of the abduction, Sandling and her two sons were living in a tent in a state park near Corvallis, Oregon.

  The boyfriend – whom Sandling insisted was “just a friend” – was a drifter named Dalt Trueblood. Sandling had met him in rehab, and when she bumped into him at the library in Eugene, she’d invited him to stay in her tent for a few weeks. It turned out Trueblood was a parole violator, although Sandling claimed she hadn’t known that.

  If child protective services were not happy to learn that home to the Sandling boys and their mother was a tent, they were even unhappier to know that a wanted felon was sharing that space. When the boys disappeared, Trueblood did, too – and until he turned up a few weeks later (drunk and disorderly, directing traffic with a red cape in downtown Portland), it was not unreasonable to think that the Sandling boys might be with him.

  Between her addicted past, her lifestyle, and the missing boyfriend – when the boys “vanished,” suspicions settled on Sandling. The idea seemed to be that she and Trueblood were in collusion, that they’d intended to present some kind of ransom plea – although this never happened. As for Trueblood, when the police arrested him in Portland and questioned him, he said he left Eugene because the kidnapping “spooked” him.

  The c
ircumstances of the kidnapping were simple enough: Sandling took her boys to the McDonald’s in Corvallis, intending to treat them to a Happy Meal. She left them in the ball pit while she went to get the food. No other kids – or adults – were in the play area. Nine adults – six of them senior citizens holding a book-group discussion – sat in the main area of the restaurant. When Sandling came back with the food, the kids were gone.

  Unfortunately for Sandling, the adults and staff in the restaurant remembered seeing her, but none of them saw her children. Some of the stories display diagrams of the McDonald’s, marking the location of customers and staff; these make it clear that Sandling and the boys had to cross the sight lines of other customers and the staff to get to the play area. Apart from the nine customers, six McDonald’s employees were behind the counter when the boys disappeared. Two cars were in the drive-through lane. No one saw a thing.

  It didn’t help Sandling’s case that at the time she reported her sons missing, she was known to leave them for hours at a time in the public library while she worked cleaning houses.

  What followed was predictable: an explosion of recriminations within the Oregon child-protective bureaucracy and a police investigation with a tight focus on Emma Sandling. The judge who a year earlier had reunited the boys with their cleaned-up mom was condemned on all sides. Social workers who’d attested to Emma Sandling’s newfound reliability were subjected to second-guessing of the most vituperative sort. There was a lot of chest-beating about how the twins – Chandler and Connor – had fallen through the cracks (“chasms,” according to the Portland paper) of the system. There were calls for investigations and the wholesale reform of the child-welfare system.

  If my experience is any guide, Emma Sandling must have been subjected to some heavy interrogation, although she, at least, seems to have had the wit to ask for a lawyer. She was not charged but held “for questioning” for thirty-two hours.

  The boys showed up eight weeks later at a shopping mall near Eureka, California. According to a feature story in the Sacramento Bee, the boys had been riding in a small motor home for “a long time” when the driver stopped for gas. It was the kind of RV – a truck and trailer, really – where the driver’s cab is separated from the passenger compartment. The boys waited for the driver to let them out. They wanted to tell him it was too hot in back; they wanted ice cream; they wanted to pee. But the driver didn’t come. They banged on the side of the trailer and yelled; then one of them threw himself at the door and, to their surprise, it fell open.