claimed he was a hundred yards away from Dillon when the shotgun went off, but FBI lab work revealed he stood six to nine feet away—close enough that Scher’s boots were splattered with Dillon’s blood, and a tiny piece of the victim’s flesh was found on Scher’s pant leg. Dillon’s body was exhumed to measure his arms, and it was proven they were too short to have held Scher’s shotgun in a position to create the gaping wound. Confronted with the new evidence, Scher admitted on the stand that he had concocted the “porcupine story.” Yes, he admitted, he’d been having an affair with Patricia Dillon. Now he claimed he and Dillon were struggling with the shotgun during a “conversation that led to an argument” about Patricia when the gun accidentally went off. However, Dillon was wearing earplugs when his body was found, and couldn’t have heard Scher talking to him.
As Dr. Scher was taken to a state prison outside Pittsburgh to serve a life sentence, Richard Walter moved into the grand home at 78 Church Street. Across from the old stone Episcopalian church, Walter would lead Stoud to the lowest region of hell.
Walter’s previous attempts to find a worthy protégé had failed miserably. He’d agreed to train three different young men, including a forensic psychologist who interviewed killers all day long and a homicide detective with twenty-five murder investigations under his belt. He’d warned them, “Someday you’ll have to interview a sixty-five-year-old man who enjoys destroying children by cutting them into little pieces. You can listen to me tell it to you now, but to be with him alone, to confront this reality, can be something else again if you are not highly structured and sound in your knowledge and belief system, if you are not of the right age or understanding to deal with it. Ideas can be very dangerous if you’re not ready for them.”
All three protégés dropped out. They couldn’t take it. The veteran homicide detective said, “I have a wife and a child. I want a sense of normality, a sense of innocence about life. You’re destroying that for me. I just can’t do it.” Walter was deeply disappointed. Reluctantly, he resigned himself to the fact that, unlike FBI agent Robert Ressler and other profiler friends, he would never have a protégé; his lifework would die with him.
“What I do is too eccentric for a healthy, normal person,” he told himself.
He discouraged the young people who approached him at parties or forensic conferences, as CSI became an international TV hit, looking for advice on how to become a “profiler.” “Young man,” he’d say, “while I understand your enthusiasm, you seem quite too normal. You look like a fine fellow who’d like to marry, have children, have a happy life, not devote yourself to something that can destroy your marriage and, ultimately, your soul. This is not for the faint of heart. There are few of us who are cut out for it.”
Few cops wanted to explore the netherworld of the criminal mind, or could do so with the scientific training of a psychologist. On the other hand, few psychologists had or wished to have experience at crime scenes. Since Freud, leading psychologists had focused on everyday behavior and its disorders with a single-minded determination not to make old-fashioned moral judgments. Murder, evil, they left to the burly, often uneducated police officer or constable.
Walter was astonished, while lecturing to prominent European psychologists on the personality subtypes of murderers, that “none of them had any idea what I was talking about. They could look at John Wayne Gacy and see schizophrenia, but they had no training in sadism. There is no psychology of evil.” Walter was a man without a country.
Then, in 1995, he was listening to Ann Rule, the bestselling true-crime author, lecture on psychopaths at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Seattle. Walter was a distinguished fellow and frequent lecturer at the conference with FBI agent Bob Ressler and others. Now he scowled in disgust. There was absolutely nothing a popular writer like Rule could teach him about psychopaths, even if she had been friends with Ted Bundy, the basis of her book The Killer Beside Me.
“Are you believing this bullshit?” Walter asked the large man sitting next to him.
“I’m good friends with Ann Rule,” the big man barked, eyeing the wan, bespectacled figure beside him. “Who the hell are you?”
Thus began one of the most important friendships in the modern history of