Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  Ellen had cross-referenced the names on the evidence room forms from the Waukesha County Sheriff Department but found no clues as to who might have gotten the cuffs to Griffin.

  After I had a good grasp on where we were with the case, I figured I should probably prepare as much as possible for my call to Dr. Werjonic following our briefing. I wouldn’t have much time to look over his notes later, so I turned my attention to the photocopied pages he’d left for me.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually I started to get used to his cryptic scribbles and was able to make out most of his writing.

  As I did so, I was struck by how his theories meshed with what I’d already learned hands-on doing my job, the information that was hardly ever emphasized at all to new cops and often seemed so inscrutable to my peers: the primacy of the timing and location of a crime, the understanding that people are motivated to commit crimes for reasons they themselves might not even understand and that spending time speculating about what those reasons might be stalls out an investigation.

  But Dr. Werjonic took things even further.

  He scrapped the whole notion of looking for means, motive, and opportunity in lieu of searching for context, patterns, and cues.

  Three interrelated concepts wove through all that he taught: activity nodes, distance decay, and victimology: “When investigating serial crimes, the key lies not in asking what the victims have in common, but where they have in common.”

  An activity node is simply a place where we spend time. So, when identifying activity nodes, you look for the eight “nodes” of a person’s life activities: the places he would normally eat, sleep, work, shop, study, worship, exercise, and relax.

  Each activity node has specific attraction factors that lead people to spend time there-that might be saving time, money, or effort, a balance of risk versus rewards, or participating in pleasurable or necessary activities.

  Then you can map out the person’s travel routes in terms of those activity nodes (circles) and the routes or roads between them (lines). Those circles and lines cover only a fraction of the geographic area of a city and help shape the person’s cognitive map of his surroundings. Almost all crimes occur within this awareness space-both with respect to victims and to offenders.

  In an investigation, you establish someone’s awareness space by pulling up his club memberships and frequent-buyer club cards, going through his credit card receipts, and analyzing where he typically purchases his gasoline and groceries and at what time of day, and so on. Also, by interviewing family and friends about his routines. Basically, doing all you can to examine the eight nodes of his life.

  Distance decay is simply the decrease in likelihood of a crime occurring as the distance from a person’s awareness space increases. That’s it.

  I thought again of Indiana.

  He skipped over it because it wasn’t part of his cognitive map.

  All of this made sense to me. People are creatures of habit. Basically, costs in terms of time, energy, and effort increase as the distance from their awareness spaces increases. So we avoid that. And killers are just as influenced by this “least amount of effort” principle as the rest of us are. Taking that into account, you get one of the primary reasons why eighty percent of murders occur within one mile of the killer’s home.

  As Dr. Werjonic wrote:

  In crime sprees, the distribution, timing, and progression of the crimes show us how the criminal understands his environment and interacts with the locations. The offender makes a choice to act at that time and in that place. It’s a rational decision that’s affected by cues from his environment and his social interactions.

  In homicide investigations, it’s possible, of course, for the initial encounter between the victim and the offender, the abduction, the murder, and the body disposal to all occur in the same general area, even in the same room, but often, especially in cases of serial homicide, several of those acts occur in different places.

  Dr. Werjonic postulated that the site of the initial encounter was perhaps the most important one in the analysis of serial offenses, something I’d never heard before.

  Contrariwise, law enforcement officers usually consider the site of the murder or the place where the body is disposed of as the most important location, but Werjonic was theorizing that in the specific cases of tracking serial offenders, by locating the place where the life of the offender and the life of the victims first intersected, you can begin to look for connections between them. That’ll help you more accurately zero in on the travel routes, the nodes, the awareness space of the killer, and then you can work backward to find his anchor point, or home base.

  Interesting.

  I pulled out a map of Milwaukee and one of Wisconsin so I could analyze what happened both here and in Plainfield. I tacked them to a corkboard easel, which I rolled to my desk. Since it looked like there might be two offenders, for now I focused on the crimes this week rather than on the previous homicides.

  It felt a little old-school to be doing this, to be sticking pins on a map, but I didn’t care. Anything that would help move this case forward.

  I used different-colored tacks-blue for the sites where we’d found Colleen, Adele, and Hendrich (the pier and the train yards), red for their homes, green for the site where Vincent had left Lionel and where Carl had left his grandmother’s corpse.

  Actually, since we knew two of the abduction sites (the Hayes and Kowalski homes), and we had the site where their abductor had taken the women to mutilate them (the boxcar), I was optimistic. We didn’t know if Hendrich’s murder was actually connected, however, so for now, I set him mentally in a different category and focused on the women.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t know where or how the initial encounter between either of them and their abductor occurred. How did he choose those two families who, at least on the surface, seemed to have nothing in common and lived in different parts of the state?

  This was shaping up to be one of the central questions in this case.

  Because of the pastiches we were looking at, or whatever you called them, I thought we should perhaps analyze the sites of Dahmer’s and Gein’s crimes as well-the graveyard, the bars Dahmer frequented, the hardware store, their residences…

  With these sites added to the mix, the number of data points would grow exponentially-even before I added in the victims’ travel patterns.

  No wonder Dr. Werjonic used computers to analyze his data. Looking for and prioritizing the importance of each of these locations in my head, or even on paper, would be terrifically difficult, especially since I wasn’t very familiar with the algorithms he used to account for distance decay.

  As I was thinking about all that, Thompson came in, smiling, carrying a Daily Donuts box. He was a burly, fun-loving guy in his late thirties. Happily married. Volunteered as a youth group leader at his church. He was also the most diehard Packers fan I knew-and around here, that was saying something. I’d never seen him without some kind of Packers paraphernalia on-a hat, shirt, belt buckle. Today, it was a lapel pin.

  He set down the box.

  A cop bringing in doughnuts. I felt like I was in the lead-up to a punch line. “Doughnuts?” I said. “Really?”

  “Not quite.” He reached into the box and brought out his prize. “Cherry turnovers.”

  Oh. Well, in that case.

  He took a substantial bite. “Want one?” As he spoke, he didn’t seem too concerned with closing his mouth to hide the half-chewed cherry turnover he was eating, and despite myself, the images of cannibalism from this case flashed through my mind and all I could think of was that he was chewing…

  Well.

  I didn’t even want to go there.

  I turned away.

  “Um, no thanks.”

  “Suit yourself. But they’re good.” He finished the turnover, then fished around in the box again and produced another one. He leaned closer and stared over my shoulder at the board as he bit into it. “Trying t
o map it out, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  Crumbs from the turnover inadvertently dropped onto my desk. “Oops,” he mumbled. “Sorry about that.”

  I tipped the papers to the side over the garbage can to get rid of the crumbs. “No big deal.” Down the hall, Ellen, Corsica, and Lieutenant Thorne were heading toward the conference room and I invited Thompson to follow me.

  “Don’t worry.” He picked up his box of cherry turnovers. “I brought enough for everyone.”

  Not at the rate you’re eating them, I thought.

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  The praying hadn’t helped.

  Even swinging by the hospital fifteen minutes ago on his way to work to walk past Adele’s and Colleen’s rooms hadn’t helped. Whispering prayers for them as he strode past their doorways, past the officers assigned to guard their rooms, had been good but hadn’t been enough to change Joshua’s mind about tomorrow.

  “Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

  Your deeds.

  Are.

  Evil.

  Joshua felt compelled to act, drawn, as it were, toward the darkness by a force more powerful than his will.

  During his lunch break he planned to drive to the bank under the pretense of making a withdrawal, but he would really be estimating where SWAT would set up their barricades, deciding where he would be able to park to still see the bank entrance. Then he would rent the moving truck.

  Despite his misgivings and conflicted feelings, he was beginning to understand who he truly was.

  He was going ahead with everything.

  Yes, he would see this through to the end.

  It would end tomorrow afternoon at four twenty-five.

  Sundown.

  The gloaming.

  54

  The briefing went surprisingly quickly, with everyone summarizing what he or she had been working on: Radar had dug up a list of Caucasian public health workers, social workers, coaches, paramedics, and cops who worked in the West Reagan Street neighborhood. So far no leads. He was still working on getting in touch with an expert on Civil War-era medical instruments to see if we might be able to trace that amputation saw we’d found in the boxcar. It turned out it was harder to find an expert than we’d thought it would be.

  Corsica was looking over Griffin’s receipts. Nothing yet to report.

  Thompson found out that Movie Flicks Video Store, which was only six blocks from the Griffin house, had a record of Griffin renting both The Fugitive and When Harry Met Sally on Sunday evening. While it wasn’t possible to know if, or when, Griffin and Mallory actually watched the movies, at least, so far, their story was checking out. Thompson was also evaluating U-Haul and moving truck rentals to see if he could find something that might lead us to someone using one to transport ten mattresses.

  Lyrie had come up dry yesterday trying to find a neighbor or work associate who’d seen a sedan that they didn’t recognize in the area preceding Vincent’s call home at around seven o’clock. He’d spoken with Adele Westin and she wasn’t able to give a physical description of her abductor.

  After the search warrant was issued for Timothy Griffin’s receipts, Ralph had done a background check on Griffin and now distributed his findings. “Nothing striking,” he noted. “You can read it over when we’re done in here.”

  Gabriele had spoken with the people at the Salvation Army thrift store and found out the director was out of town at a fundraising dinner and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. However, she was going to continue to follow up on hotels, used-furniture stores, and thrift stores in that part of town to see if we could track down where the offender got the mattresses from, in the hopes that someone at the store would be able to identify him.

  Thorne told us he’d looked up the other true crime books Heather Isle had written and one was about Ted and James Oswald. “No address for Ms. Isle that I can find. No photo on the book. I’m working at tracking her down to have a chat. Ask her a few questions about her sources.”

  The Oswalds again. They just kept popping up on the periphery of this case.

  Looking for a connection between this week’s victims, Ellen reported that she’d spoken with Adele, Colleen, Vincent and, on the phone, with Carl, who was still in custody in Plainfield. The couples had never met, never lived near each other. There were no areas of their lives that appeared to overlap. “I’m going to follow up on that more. There’s got to be something there.”

  The CSIU didn’t come up with much either. Based on the temperature of Hendrich’s body and the temperature in the boxcar, they estimated time of death to be between two and four p.m., which didn’t really narrow things down too much for us. No incriminating prints were found in the stolen Ford Taurus, the locks, the fence, the items in the boxcars, or the police tape. Initial tests showed that only two people’s blood was present on the floor of the boxcar, so I was at least thankful there wasn’t evidence of additional crimes. The CSIU did find some DNA inside the plastic bag-apparently our guy put something in there after all. No DNA results yet, though. Two weeks at the earliest.

  The guy who was abducting these women and (if he was the same person) who’d killed Hendrich was good. Apart from the DNA in the bag, so far pretty much everything we’d put into play was coming up empty. It was almost like he knew exactly what we would be looking for and how to keep us from finding it.

  I summarized the information from Dr. Werjonic that I’d been reading regarding nodes, distance decay, and victimology. “One of the points that Dr. Werjonic kept bringing out really grabbed me,” I told them. “Sometimes the killer chooses the locations for expedience, sometimes the locations choose the crimes.”

  “What does that mean?” Thorne asked.

  “Well, the killer didn’t choose the bar, the alley, the pier or the hardware store, or that specific graveyard for expedience, or to save time, money, or effort; he was evidently choosing them because of their significance to the lives of Dahmer and Gein. In a sense, the locations chose the crimes, which means that something more important than saving time, money, or effort is guiding our guy’s crime spree.”

  “Telling a story?” Corsica said.

  “Paying homage?” Ralph suggested.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But it wasn’t just Dahmer’s apartment-it was the alley that was significant in his eventual arrest. It wasn’t Gein’s house, but the same hardware store where Gein shot and killed his final victim-the scene that led the police to his home. So we’re looking at the locations that eventually led to these two guys’ apprehension, not just at their crimes.”

  Thorne nodded. “Good.”

  “So here’s what I’m thinking. If we could postulate other killers that our guy might want to draw attention to-or pay homage to, or whatever-we could stake out the locations that were significant to their arrest. Try to get one step ahead of this guy.”

  Nods around the table.

  “But,” Ellen said, “we’d be looking for someone on the same level of depravity as Dahmer or Gein? From Wisconsin? That should be a short list. There can’t be too many other killers from the state with that kind of grisly reputation.”

  “I’ll see what I can find,” Radar offered.

  I gave assignments to everyone else.

  Thompson would delve deeper into the pastiche idea, see what other connections the victims and missing persons in this crime spree-or this set of crime sprees-might have that paralleled Dahmer’s or Gein’s life or their crimes. This included looking into the possibility that Ralph and I had talked about yesterday, that the homicide near Cincinnati might have some sort of connection to Dahmer’s first murder in Bath, Ohio.

  Ellen and Ralph would keep pursuing the victimology research.

  Corsica announced that she would continue focusing on the receipts and compare Griffin’s catalog subscription list to our suspect list. Also, she’d see if there was anything else Hendrich might have bought from or sol
d to Griffin to try to establish if someone had been setting him up from the start.

  Gabriele and Lyrie would visit the hospital, interview Colleen, and try to find out who else besides Griffin might have known about the cuffs. Earlier interviews with Vincent hadn’t produced any names.

  Thorne was going to keep looking for a way to reach Heather Isle and focus on leads related to Hendrich’s homicide.

  I decided to examine the Oswald case. Ted and James weren’t cannibals, weren’t as infamous as Dahmer or Gein, but their case was certainly bizarre, and had been highly publicized when they were arrested back in 1994. Certainly, with the cuffs, the Heather Isle book, and the unsuccessful pleas of Dahmer and Ted regarding diminished responsibility for their crimes because of extenuating circumstances, it seemed that the Oswalds were at least tangentially connected to this investigation.

  We ended the briefing at 10:54 a.m., with everyone heading off to work on their respective projects. I’d seen the chaplain visiting Colleen at the hospital yesterday and now, on my way to my desk, I asked him how she was. “Okay,” he told me. “I think she’s more concerned about what’s going to happen to her husband than she is about being attacked…in the manner she was.” It was selfless and courageous of her, but I’d gotten a similar feeling when Radar and I visited her room on Monday.

  I rolled out my chair and took a seat at my desk.

  On the note that Dr. Werjonic had left for me, he’d requested that I call him between 11:00 and 11:05, which seemed quirkily specific, but it just might have been that he liked things to be prompt and precise.

  First, I put a call through to Detective Browning, the man whom Ralph and I had spoken with at the Waukesha Sheriff’s Department, to get the Oswald case files delivered here to HQ. I had the sense he wouldn’t be too happy about it, but right now worrying about hurting the guy’s feelings was not at the top of my priority list.

  No answer.

  I left a message explaining what we needed.