A Murder in Music City

by Michael Bishop

  At the end of the meal, we said good-bye and went our separate ways into the night. As I walked back to my car, my thoughts were racing: If I end up dead in the coming weeks, of just about any cause, my wife should probably alert the local district attorney that I was murdered. Could a couple of detectives, maybe the low-level detectives who were part of the group as Nurse Evelyn had mentioned, could those two detectives have helped clean up the crime scene on Timberhill Drive before the 11:00 p.m. call was made to the police dispatcher? Who better to do the deed, threaten Jo Herring, and then cover it up at the same time?

  …and be sure your sin will find you out.

  —Numbers 32:23, Old Testament

  With Gina's reluctance to aid the cause, and with Jesse Henderson's apparent departure from society, not to mention the lengthy challenge of tracking down his old friend BlueSky, I was almost ready to attend a séance in hopes of communicating with one of my childhood heroes, Sherlock Holmes. But a fictional detective was going to do little to help me, so I did the next best thing: I tracked down the man described by many as the “Living Sherlock Holmes,” Mr. Richard Walter.1

  Richard Walter, a brilliant forensic psychologist and one of the pioneers of criminal profiling, spent more than two decades and thousands of hours studying and working with convicted felons in the Michigan prison system, one of the largest populations of violent criminals in the United States.2 In this “laboratory” setting, Walter honed his considerable talents with treatment and daily interviews of criminals of all varieties: serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, and more. And after a period of time, he began to share his findings and his insights with the academic community, as well as with law enforcement agencies.

  Walter's insight was routinely requested for seemingly unsolvable cold cases and the most difficult of investigations, in part, because Richard Walter abhorred the routine and the outdated homicide investigation model, and instead preached a new gospel of recognizing and modeling the artistry, symbolism, and motivations of the criminal's own mind in order to solve cases. Eventually, he became an international consultant to law enforcement agencies, including Scotland Yard, where he was tagged with the “Sherlock Holmes” nickname he came to loathe, and he also provided consulting expertise to America's FBI and other agencies.3

  In 1990, Richard Walter was one of the three founding members of the Vidocq Society, an organization named in honor of the famous French detective, François Vidocq, an eighteenth-century French criminal turned cop. Vidocq's ability to catch criminals was legendary, and he is credited with creating the first private detective agency in Paris in the early 1800s. Vidocq also had the foresight to hire former criminals to help with his new crime-solving enterprise.

  With the founding of the new Vidocq Society, Richard Walter and his colleagues had a standing offer to provide free assistance to law enforcement personnel, especially if the case involved unsolved deaths and other major crimes. And, for the past twenty-five years, the best forensic minds in the world gather monthly for a meal in Philadelphia at the Union League to review, debate, and solve the unsolvable cases presented to its membership.4

  A book about its founding members, The Murder Room, by Michael Capuzzo, was the catalyst behind my attempt to reach out to Walter. I hoped that he might listen to the story of the eighteen-year-old babysitter and perhaps provide a fresh perspective on a homicide investigation that was not so much unsolved, given John Randolph Clarke's 1964 conviction, as it was, perhaps, incorrectly solved.5

  In November of 2011, while awaiting a flight from Providence, Rhode Island, back to Nashville, my cell phone rang, and a phone number that I did not recognize appeared on the screen, followed by a man's voice that I didn't know. When the speaker identified himself as Richard Walter, I remembered having left a voice message for him several days prior. His voice and speaking pattern was formal and distinct, a clipped enunciation of every word, with an occasional “my dear fellow” added to the conversation.

  Richard Walter told me that he was preparing for a presentation at Drexel University as a panelist on the topic of Jack the Ripper,6 but he wanted to know more about the research I was doing.

  Over the next several minutes, I quickly told the story of the 1964 murder and the little boy who slept through the tragic event. I noted the missing paperback book, Jo Herring's secret lifestyle with powerful men in the community, and her close relationship with a nurse named Lizzie. I then noted my personal involvement, including the assistance of Dr. Al Harper of the Henry Lee Institute in Connecticut. I was careful not to include any of my own assumptions along the way, but instead I attempted to let the facts, as reported in 1964, be presented for evaluation.

  Perhaps my mention of Dr. Harper was confirmation that I was committed to finding the truth with regard to Paula Herring's slaying. After stating that I had no law enforcement or legal background, I was relieved to hear Walter say that he knew Dr. Harper and that he wanted to learn more about the slaying of the babysitter. And thus began an enlightening exchange with a world-class expert.

  “Did the mother try to recruit the daughter into the partying lifestyle, the secret group in other words?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of, and I don't think the daughter would have been open to it.” I said.

  “Do you know the mother's sexual preference? Many times the unusual interest in servicing men, whether for money or power, reflects other than heterosexual tendencies. Might she have had such a relationship with the nurse named Lizzie?”

  “I don't know about that.”

  “Was the victim sexually assaulted in this crime?” he asked.

  “Well, that's an interesting question. Technically, John Randolph Clarke, the man ultimately convicted of the crime, was initially charged with murder in the first-degree and also rape on the body of Paula Herring. But somewhere between the grand jury's indictment and the trial itself, the prosecution dropped the rape charge. The medical examiner testified that the victim had not been sexually assaulted, and I have no new information to cause me to disagree with that assessment.”

  “So, if a sex fiend did this, then what did he get out of it?” he asked.

  “I don't think I can answer that,” I replied.

  “We'll come back to that in a moment. Was there an insurance policy in play?” he asked.

  “Yes, with regard to the victim's father, found dead in 1960, and no, or at least unknown, with regard to the eighteen-year-old daughter,” I said.7

  “What about the cause of death for the victim's father?”

  “Funny you should ask. His death was attributed to suicide, and the official cause noted as ingestion of rat poison, what I understand to be an arsenic-based solution. A bottle of it was found in his hotel room. Oh, and something else, want to know who discovered the body? His wife did, and she brought another nurse friend with her. And then, three-and-a-half years later, the widow discovers another dead family member, her eighteen-year-old daughter, but this time at home,” I noted.

  “My dear fellow, poison is a woman's murder tool. That's how women usually do murder. And, they almost always bring a witness when they, shall we say, ‘discover’ the crime. That's a red flag. We call that a ‘clue’ for investigators.”

  I started laughing and had to cover my mouth to keep from making too much noise. I then apologized to my new friend on the phone. His dry wit was a nice break from the seriousness of the conversation, and I had not been expecting it.

  “Were there any facial injuries on the victim, or defensive wounds? And how would you describe the room where the victim was found?” he asked.

  “A lot of facial trauma, bruises, bloody nose, no apparent wounds on the hands or forearms. If the victim was engaged in a fight to the death, as I assume she was, the room was surprisingly ‘in order,’ with nothing in disarray except, of course, for the dead girl on the floor, the girl's sweater wadded up on the end of the couch, and a little toy army man underneath the television,” I said.

  “Wh
at was the official cause of death?” he asked.

  “That would be two gunshots in the back, from a .32-caliber pistol, and noted to have been while the victim was lying facedown on the floor, either unconscious or semi-conscious, at least according to statements by the medical examiner.”8

  “And you say a child slept through the gunshots being fired in the house?”

  “That's the story,” I said.

  “Do you understand how deafening that would be?”

  “I'm familiar with firearms, so yes, I do.”

  “I assume you have a copy of the autopsy report?”

  “Actually, I don't, because no autopsy was performed at the time,” I said.9

  “That's highly unusual. Can you get a hold of the medical examiner's records?”

  “I made an attempt. They were left with the medical examiner's family after the old doctor passed away, but I'm told the family destroyed the records after a few decades, thinking they didn't want to take a chance on any of the information getting into the public realm. I can't say that I blame them for that. I do have the crime-scene photographs from the case, and they include some stark black and white photos of the victim as if she was being prepared for an autopsy, but no autopsy was performed,” I said.

  “At some point, it would be helpful for me to review those records. But in the interest of time, and given that you've got a plane to catch, let me offer some initial insight for your consideration.”

  “Thank you; I'm making notes,” I said.

  “Investigators tend to wander afar. This lead or that bit of information leads the investigator farther and farther away from the central issue.”

  “I can relate to that,” I replied.

  “Thus we go back to the central issue. There lies the person. Who has the closest interest? The victim was not sexually assaulted. She's not undressed. The room is not disturbed. Yet, she was murdered in her own home. If a sex fiend did this, what did he get out of it? So you have a purposeful killing, in your own home, with minimal cleanup.”

  “Purposeful?” I softly asked.

  “There was a purposeful reason for the murder. And that could be this: It's likely what the girl knew, and what she might tell, ensured that she was going to die. Does that help you?”

  “Yes, sir, most definitely. Thank you. I'll get a letter out to you over the weekend, and it will include some of the exhibits and other documents for review at your convenience.”

  “Good, let's stay in touch,” he said.

  While driving through western North Carolina a few weeks later, my cell phone rang and I heard the unmistakable voice of my new friend Richard Walter. After a brief exchange and enough time for me to exit the road I was on, I pulled into an abandoned store's empty parking lot, whereupon Richard Walter proceeded to stun me with his initial assessment of the package I had sent to him.

  “I reviewed your notes and photographs, and I have a few questions for you,” he said.1

  “Go ahead, I'm ready.”

  “What was John Clarke's defense on the witness stand?” he asked.

  “That he didn't do the crime, had never met the victim, and was not in her neighborhood on that Saturday night. However, he had certainly met the mother, in the biblical sense, some two weeks prior to the eighteen-year-old victim coming home for the weekend. And he willingly testified for five hours on the witness stand during the week of the criminal trial in 1964,” I said.2

  “I see that the defendant's father was a judge. Did he support his son's defense? Provide bail money perhaps?” Walter asked.

  “I believe the bail money was ultimately arranged through Clarke's wife. Basically, Clarke's father-in-law pledged some property in a nearby county as collateral to bond him out.”3

  “So Clarke's father saw the murder the way the state did?” Walter's voice lifted a half step with this question.

  “No, I didn't mean to imply that. In fact, Clarke's father paid for a very good defense attorney from East Tennessee to be a part of his son's team at trial. The team was made up of four attorneys. And I did manage to meet with John Randolph Clarke's ninety-two-year-old stepmother in his hometown in East Tennessee. She may have been ninety-two, but she moved and acted as if she were fifty-two. We met in a church building in Jonesborough, and she told me straight up that there was no way John would have had the nerve to kill anyone. No way. He was more about fun and games than anything violent. At least that was her viewpoint of her stepson,” I said.

  “And you say there was no autopsy?”

  “Correct.”

  “In one of the photographs of the victim, I think I see evidence of bruising on her neck consistent with the type of bruising left by a belt or strap, approximately one to two inches wide,” he noted.

  “Uh-oh. That hasn't come up before.”

  “It would explain some things,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “With a strong athletic girl such as this victim, in this type of murder you have to control her. That is easily accomplished when you attack the victim from behind, using a belt or strap around the neck. It can be placed around the neck before the victim even realizes what's happening. With pressure, in just a few seconds the victim would lose consciousness; no oxygen flow to the brain, and you're out.”

  “Thirty seconds?” I asked.

  “Actually less than that would do the trick,” Walter said.

  “Just like the Boston Strangler; that was his methodology,” I replied. “Not with a belt. He used the crook of his arm to create a lever to accomplish the same thing, like a wrestler's sleeper hold,” I mused aloud.4

  “My dear fellow, this was a purposeful killing. That's an intentional word, meaning this wasn't some random event in the neighborhood that took place. There's no rape, and there's no robbery. I would view this as a bit of a mix between a Power Assertive murder, with evidence of Anger Retaliatory, though not completely anger in motivation. The victim is left dead and posed in a classic Anger Retaliatory pose. She could have been controlled with a belt or strap, moved into the den, and then finished off, though I must say it appears to have taken some effort to kill her.”

  “It's just chilling to hear you describe it,” I said. All was quiet for a few moments as I thought about the visual Richard Walter had painted. I sat quietly in my car, staring toward an orange sun slowly dropping behind the mountain range west of Asheville, North Carolina. From the background research I had done on Richard Walter, I knew some held him up as the father of modern criminal profiling, and, together with Dr. Robert Kessler, he had proposed a more useful model for profiling killers. As for the Power Assertive type that he mentioned, I learned that it simply meant that the murder was most likely unplanned but part of controlling the victim.5 Then, Walter surprised me with another question.

  “Would you be able to come to Philadelphia and present the case to the Vidocq Society? Normally, we only look at unsolved cold cases, but this is a unique set of circumstances, if I may say so. A few times per year we have a formal presentation of a case during the monthly meal. Members will be asking you questions and sometimes arguing with each other over the interpretation. I can help you with the presentation. You can travel for this, yes?”6

  I wanted to say yes and thank him for even considering the Paula Herring murder as a possible topic for the world's best investigators, but I knew how the invitation would eventually resolve itself, so I said the words I hated to say to the man I least wanted to disappoint.

  “I can't tell you how helpful that would be, and I'm flattered that the case would be considered, but if I understand correctly, your bylaws say you only take cases presented by law enforcement or a related party, but not private citizens.”

  “You're not connected to a law enforcement agency?”

  “No, sir, I am not. Just a private citizen with a commitment to discovering what really happened to the babysitter.”

  “Well, that would have been an interesting presentation. Let's see, I'll be in Atlanta at
the American Academy of Forensic Science Conference in a few weeks. Can you meet me there? I'll have some additional notes for you by then, and I'll have some insights regarding the little boy who slept through the murder,” he said.

  “I'll find a way to be there, and I look forward to it.”

  I could not foresee that, a few weeks later in Atlanta, Richard Walter would also explain a mystery that I had previously decided was unknowable, the reason that Jo Herring had purchased not one but two burial plots hours after her daughter's murder.

  Now I had two important missing people I needed to find—Jesse Henderson and BlueSky. Unknown to Gina, I had already devised a roadmap of sorts to BlueSky. My plan was a simple one, I just needed to find Jesse Henderson's daughter. My thinking was that if BlueSky truly was an old friend of Jesse Henderson, then he also might have a World War II background, perhaps another Navy man. After mulling it over, I came to the conclusion that there were only two possible people on the planet whom Jesse Henderson would keep track of at his advanced age. His daughter was one. And BlueSky was the other.

  I did not know the daughter's name, nor how old she was, if she had ever been married, or if she had been married five times. I did remember being told that she might be living in North Carolina, and I got the impression that Jesse Henderson might have been in contact with her because he always spoke glowingly of his only child.

  Since I didn't know where Jesse Henderson was living, I wasn't going to receive any help from him in finding his friend BlueSky, nor was I going to get an assist from Gina. But I realized that a mother most likely would know where her daughter was living. And if the daughter could point me toward the missing Jesse Henderson, then maybe I had another shot at finding BlueSky.

  Unknown to Jesse, I previously had found his former wife, Betty, almost a year earlier, living exactly as Henderson himself had described, in the mountains of North Georgia. Our conversation had taken place in a nursing home where Betty's mother was a patient. The discussion went rather well, except for the times when Jesse Henderson's former mother-in-law accused me of being the devil and told her daughter to kick me out of the room.