The Woman in Darkness

by Charlie Donlea

  “Oh, boy,” Lane said, looking up from the file and staring at Rory.

  “What?” Rory asked.

  “Something’s piqued your interest about this case, hasn’t it?”

  “Stop it, Lane.”

  “I know how you operate, Rory. Something about your father’s involvement in this case has planted itself in that brain of yours and now you can’t let it go.”

  With her father gone, Lane Phillips was the only other person who fully understood Rory’s obsession with things unknown. His history as a psychologist stopped Rory from pretending he was incorrect. Dr. Phillips knew the workings of the human brain well, and Rory’s, in particular, better than most. This quirk in her personality was what made her such a sought-after forensic reconstructionist. Until she had all the answers about a case, she was helpless to stop her mind from working to find them. Especially if an initial glance at a case held something that made no sense, and her father’s involvement with the man the papers called The Thief made no sense at all.

  “Tell me about this guy,” she said again.

  Lane wrapped his hand around the bottom of his beer mug, spun it in place as he collected his thoughts on the long-ago case. “The prosecution pushed for Murder One, the jury came back with second-degree for the lone victim. But this guy was suspected in many other cases of missing women,” Lane said. “Five or six … I’d have to look it up.”

  “Five or six homicides? Nothing in his file mentions other victims. And it would be impossible to make parole if he killed so many.”

  “He was suspected of more killings, never charged. And you won’t find anything formally linking him to the other killings. Just rumor and conjecture.”

  “Why did they go after him for only one homicide if they thought there were more?”

  Lane closed the file. “A few reasons. The city was in a panic in the late seventies. You had the Son of Sam still lingering on people’s minds—he was the nut who killed a bunch of people in New York in 1976. Then, here in Chicago, we had the horror of John Wayne Gacy having killed and buried thirty-some boys in his crawl space. Then, during the summer of 1979, women started disappearing and the city bubbled with fear. The whole summer was filled with heat and anxiety. Eventually, toward the end of summer, the police found their man. But the way they discovered him was very unorthodox, and it was entirely thanks to an autistic woman who pieced it all together.”

  Rory leaned forward across the bar to listen more intently. She was more interested now than she had been.

  “The method in which this woman gathered and delivered the evidence was very strange, and the DA knew none of the evidence would stand up in court. Most was flat-out inadmissible. Neither side wanted a trial. If the prosecution failed to convince the jury of his guilt, this guy would walk. If they succeeded, he’d be eligible for the death penalty, which was still around in 1979. So a trial was risky for both sides. In the end, the DA made the choice to go after him on the single homicide. They had shaky evidence, a lot of circumstance, and no body.”

  “No body?”

  “No. That’s why it was such a risk to go to trial, and why they went after him for only the single victim. No bodies were ever found, besides one that they could never tie to him in any meaningful way. And with no body, the jury came back with a guilty verdict for Murder Two. The conviction sent him away for sixty years, but allowed for parole after thirty. The sentence put the city’s fears to rest.”

  “And now, after ten years of parole hearings and forty years in jail, he’s about to be granted his freedom.”

  Lane shook his head. “I studied this case for my book, but the details never made it past the final edits. That woman who figured it all out. Goddamn, I still remember the headlines. ‘Schizophrenic Woman Brings Down The Thief.’”

  “Schizophrenic?”

  “No one knew anything about autism back then. Plus, ‘Schizophrenic’ sold more papers.”

  Rory looked into the black abyss of her Surly Darkness stout, lifted the mug, and swallowed the rest of the beer. She wanted to order another. She longed for a touch of dizziness to soften her thoughts about this autistic woman she knew nothing about. She knew those curiosities were taking root in her mind and that they would be impossible to ignore. She stared up at Lane.

  “What ever happened to her? The autistic woman?”

  Lane tapped the file with his finger. “Her name was Angela Mitchell. He killed her before she had a chance to testify.”

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  TWO DAYS AFTER HER BREAKDOWN, ANGELA WAS AT THE DOCTOR’S office, sitting on the table in a thin gown and pulling at her eyelashes.

  “Relax, darling,” the nurse said as she prepped the syringe. “I just need two vials. You won’t feel a thing.”

  Angela looked the other way when the nurse pressed the needle to the inside of her elbow, but it wasn’t the threat of a needle that had her on edge. Her panic attack had set Thomas’s radar on high alert, and he’d forced her to see the doctor before things got out of control. Little did he know that things were far beyond that. Baring her paranoia to Thomas had set loose even more angst now that she was at the clinic. She’d been through this routine before. Most of her adolescence had been spent in doctors’ offices and on psychiatrists’ couches. Back when she was under the rule of her parents, doctors and shrinks were her way of life. Her parents believed that if Angela saw enough of them, and the right ones, they could psychoanalyze her back to health. When none of the therapists could do for their daughter what Angela’s parents demanded, they admitted her to a juvenile psychiatric facility.

  Angela was seventeen when her parents forced her into that place, and she spent seven months there until she discharged herself on her eighteenth birthday. It was only with the help of a dear friend that Angela had escaped that life. She had been on a (mostly) smooth trajectory for the last several years. Since meeting Thomas, she’d tightly managed her anxiety and had even felt like she was starting to fit into society. Her autism was something no one understood, including the many doctors who pretended otherwise, and Angela had long ago stopped trying to explain to others how her mind operated. She had learned over many years of criticism and failure that no one could fully comprehend the way her thoughts were organized. Yet, here she was again, waiting for a doctor to explain what was wrong with her.

  She knew, though, that Thomas meant well. His eagerness for her to seek psychiatric help was simply his way of trying to protect her. He didn’t know her full history. Angela had tried her best to keep hidden the dark days of her teenage years. And until just recently, the ruse had worked. Thomas had opened her life to new opportunities. He made her feel safe. But despite the progress, the events of the summer had made her realize how frail a hold she had on it all. The missing women who had run through the folds of her mind, and the idea that they were part of a longer string of violence, had started Angela down a road with no turnoffs. Despite Angela recognizing that her obsession with these women was unhealthy, she felt a connection to them that she couldn’t ignore.

  The stranger from the alley, who had reappeared in Catherine’s kitchen, had set loose her anxiety in ways that transported her through the years and back to her adolescence. The obsessive-compulsive disorder she thought she had tethered and stowed in a locked-off compartment of her psyche had been reawakened to wreak havoc, like when she was younger. On top of it all, she feared that her affliction would push Thomas away. She feared now that Thomas had gotten a clear look at her paranoia; the anchor that had steadied her for the last couple of years was breaking free from its mooring to leave Angela adrift and alone. So many worries ran through her mind, she had trouble keeping track of them all.

  “All done, darling,” the nurse said, bringing Angela’s thoughts back to the present. The nurse held two vials of deep red blood in her gloved hand.

  “The doctor will be right in.”

  A few minutes later, the doctor entered the room and performed
a cursory exam.

  “Have you had panic attacks in the past?” the doctor asked while he scribbled in the chart.

  “No,” she said. “I mean … when I was younger, but they didn’t call them that.”

  The doctor took a minute to finish writing, and then looked at Angela. “You used to take lithium as a teenager. Was it effective?”

  Angela, who normally would shy away from a man staring at her, peered back with an intensity that surprised even herself. The horrors of her teenage years fueled her rage.

  “No! He forced me to take it, and my parents went along with him.”

  “Who?”

  “The psychiatrist my parents sent me to. The one who kept me locked away in the psychiatric hospital. He believed I had a behavioral disorder, and that I was a manic-depressive. They used lithium to sedate me. Besides putting me to sleep, it gave me wild hallucinations.”

  The doctor paused before nodding. “Yes, not everyone responds to it.” He pulled a prescription pad from the breast pocket of his jacket and jotted on it. He tore the page free and handed her the slip. “This is for Valium, it will take the edge off with none of the side effects of lithium.”

  He jotted again onto the pad and tore a second slip free.

  “And here is the name of a psychiatrist. I think you should talk with someone. I’ve been referring many of my female patients to him lately. The missing women from the city have gotten a lot of people spooked. Talking with someone will help. In the meantime, push fluids until the vomiting passes. The Valium should help, and, Mrs. Mitchell,” the doctor said as he stood, “the police are good at what they do. They’ll catch this guy. That will be the best cure for everything you’ve got going on.”

  On the way out of the clinic, Angela crumpled the paper that held the shrink’s name, dropped it in the trash bin, and climbed into her car. She walked into the pharmacy ten minutes later to fill her Valium prescription.

  CHAPTER 13

  Chicago, October 23, 2019

  RORY PUT A CALL IN TO DETECTIVE DAVIDSON. HE OWED HER AFTER the setup with Camille Byrd’s father; now she was calling in the favor. She needed everything he could find on the old case from 1979. Having scoured the dark corners of Cook County federal buildings in search of what Rory needed, Ron came through, delivering three boxes of information to her door earlier in the afternoon. Now the boxes were stacked next to her desk while Rory pored over the details.

  She had emptied the first box and spread the contents onto her desk. The facts about the 1979 case fascinated her. More than anything, the enigmatic woman named Angela Mitchell, who had managed to identify a serial killer, drew all of Rory’s attention. Rory felt a strange connection to the woman from four decades ago. Angela Mitchell had done, essentially, what Rory did now—she put names and narratives to victims in order to reconstruct crimes.

  The defense team who represented The Thief, of which her father was a member, had created a biography of Angela Mitchell. It described her as a “socially awkward twenty-nine year-old woman who suffered from autism and a limited ability to understand her surroundings.” An obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, the report continued, limited her abilities to handle the activities of daily living; and at the time during which she collected the “evidence” the prosecution had been allowed to present at trial, she was on heavy doses of Valium. The report went on in length about Angela’s troubled adolescence, her time spent in a juvenile psychiatric hospital, and her estrangement from her parents. Taken on its surface, the account painted an unflattering image of Angela Mitchell.

  The more Rory read, though, the more connected she felt to the woman from years ago. Their stories were similar in many ways. Although Rory was never estranged from her parents, quite the opposite, and she had never been forced into a psych ward, Rory’s childhood had been plagued by many of the same ailments as Angela’s. Instead of shipping Rory off to doctors and hospitals, her parents had sent her to Aunt Greta’s house during the summers and on most weekends. Although no medication was forced on Rory, Aunt Greta offered different remedies for Rory’s social anxiety. Without her great-aunt, Rory’s childhood might have been written about using the identical language as Angela Mitchell’s.

  She pushed the thought of Angela Mitchell’s supposed Valium addiction from her mind, working hard to prevent the comparison to the glass of Three Floyds Dark Lord stout that rested in front of her. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Rory was on her second glass, her head vertiginous with the early effects of the alcohol. In a show of rebellion to her own thoughts, she lifted the glass, took a long swallow, and then spent two hours on the 1979 file, lost in the details of Angela Mitchell and what she had managed to do. Rory made it through two full boxes, but left the third untouched for now. She turned to her desktop and typed the name Angela Mitchell into the search engine. After scrolling through pages of links that had nothing to do with The Thief from 1979, Rory finally came across a few general articles that rehashed some details about the case. None of the online hits held revelations that were not already in the boxes next to her.

  She was ready to shut down her computer when she came to a link for a Facebook page titled Justice for Angela. The page had twelve hundred followers and the last post had been made two years prior, a short paragraph dated August 31, 2017:

  Today marks the 38th anniversary of my dear friend Angela Mitchell’s disappearance. So many decades later, and there are still no leads on the case. Few members of the Chicago Police Department even remember Angela, and those that do are long retired and gave up hope long ago of discovering what really happened to her during the summer of 1979. Those of us who are part of this online community looking for answers know that no resolutions were provided during the farce of a trial that took place in 1980. With each passing year, it seems more and more likely that the only one who could shed light on the truth is sitting in jail. He, of course, refuses to utter a word about Angela.

  As always, anyone with tips or information about Angela Mitchell can comment on this thread and I’ll follow up with you personally. The smallest detail, even this many years later, could be helpful.

  The Facebook post included a grainy image of Angela Mitchell. It was actually a photo of a photo. The person who posted it had used a cell phone to capture the old Polaroid picture, which was yellowed and faded by age, the camera’s flash reflecting off the upper corner of the plastic photograph. Rory looked at Angela Mitchell. She was a petite woman, who, in the photo, stood next to a taller woman, who Rory assumed was the author of the Facebook post. In the snapshot, Angela smiled shyly at the camera, her gaze slightly down and to the left, unable, Rory understood, to stare directly into the camera’s lens. Rory had the same affliction.

  Lane had been correct with his assumption earlier at the bar. The seed of curiosity had been planted in Rory’s mind, and stopping it from growing was as impossible as stopping the sun from rising. She was initially curious about the case because of her father’s involvement. But now, since learning more about the mysterious woman at the center of it, Rory felt the familiar pull of interest she knew she couldn’t ignore. It was the same feeling she encountered at the start of a reconstruction. Some part of her mind would be unable to rest until she knew everything there was to know about Angela Mitchell.

  She finally looked away from the gritty Facebook image and did something she would never normally consider. She clicked the mouse over the comment section and typed quickly: My name is Rory Moore. I need some details about Angela Mitchell. Please contact me.

  Rory hit the return key before she could reconsider, scrolled to the top of the Facebook page, clicked the About icon, and pulled up information on the person who created the page. The woman claimed to be Angela Mitchell’s closest friend from the summer of 1979. Her name was Catherine Blackwell.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  THE VALIUM WAS HELPING. SHE HADN’T VOMITED IN THREE DAYS, AND the headaches came less often. The medication was
dulling the urge to dig at her scabbed shoulders, and the drug’s overall effect was blunting her paranoia and keeping Thomas’s concerns at bay. Angela was taking twice the suggested dosage, though, and she worried not only about overmedicating herself, but also about what would happen when the pills ran out. Thomas had been watching her closely since the breakdown, and Angela worked hard to keep things together and convince him that since her visit with the doctor she was feeling well. That she had her short relapse under control. That the identity of the stranger from the alley, while at first disconcerting, had now led to relief. And, most important, that she didn’t need to see a psychiatrist.

  The acting and camouflaging of her symptoms was exhausting, and Angela wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep up the ruse. But a reprieve was coming. Thomas was scheduled to inspect a work site in Indianapolis over the weekend and meet with the builder, who was planning a 150-home subdivision. Thomas and Bill were bidding on the job and he would be gone all of Saturday and most of Sunday. Talk of canceling the trip had started after Thomas came home a few days before to find Angela covered in blood and melting down in ways she had never before displayed to her husband. But desperately needing both time away from Thomas’s suffocating concern, and the opportunity to explore her suspicions about Leonard Williams, Angela had used all her willpower and double the usual dosage of Valium to put up a façade of normalness and well-being. Now, Saturday morning, Angela gave one more push while she and Thomas sat at the kitchen table and drank their morning coffee.

  “Just go,” Angela said. “I’m feeling much better.”