Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,117
a gruesome image appeared over the white tablecloths: The decayed corpse of a twenty-seven-year-old woman lay between hedgerows in a remote part of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, apparently strangled to death. The case had languished with the Pennsylvania State Police for six years. Walter and other VSMs picked a prime suspect before dessert. “It is not, in this case, rocket science,” Walter said.
The victim’s twenty-four-year-old live-in boyfriend was a pizza deliveryman with no criminal record. But he had abused and threatened the victim, and drew additional attention to himself with his unusual nickname, “Ted Bundy.” It was one of many truth-too-strange-for-Hollywood moments in the Murder Room, and as it happened, a herd of Hollywood types was at the round tables listening.
They later were escorted to Frank Bender’s studio, where they ogled the artist’s unique collection of the living and the dead. The producers took the Vidocq founders to Le Bec-Fin, the renowned French restaurant where dinner for two can cost $700, and wooed them for their life story rights. Walter, who hated to be sold anything, found the process disconcerting.
“Kevin Spacey will play you,” a producer told him as a limousine whisked them through the Philadelphia night. “He’ll make a great, great American detective.”
Walter blinked in astonishment. “That’s wonderful! That’s truly grand! Who’s Kevin Spacey?”
“You . . . you don’t go to the movies?”
“Oh, no, my dear boy. I can’t stand the sound of popcorn being chewed.”
Four days later, Fleisher, Bender, and Walter celebrated as Jersey Films, owned by Danny DeVito, offered $1.3 million for the society’s movie rights. Before long, DeVito was inviting Bender to Hollywood for a party, and Robert De Niro, it was reported, was an unabashed Bender fan. The artist’s friends shuddered imagining the possibilities of Bender’s social life in Hollywood.
By May, retired FBI agent Robert Ressler, VSM, was touring to promote his new bestselling book, I Have Lived in the Monster, including his exclusive interview with “the Monster of Milwaukee” Jeffrey Dahmer, the worst serial killer he had ever encountered.
Ressler had spent two days interviewing the gay cannibal convicted of murdering seventeen men and boys and eating from their remains. He was sickened by Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment. Three heads in a freezer, one in the refrigerator, hands in a cooking pot. No food in the apartment—just a chain saw for butchering, vials to drink blood. Dahmer had drugged and tortured his victims and told them, “I’m going to eat your heart,” drilled holes in their skulls, and poured in battery acid to make them sex-slave zombies.
Yet Ressler surprisingly came away from his meeting with the killer feeling “only empathy for the tormented and twisted person who sat before me” who said he killed and ate his visitors to overcome loneliness. Dahmer was insane, Ressler said, and deserved life in a mental hospital, not his prison sentence of nearly a thousand years. He testified in Dahmer’s defense.
Walter was horrified by his friend’s view. Walter insisted that Dahmer was a sane, cold psychopath who must be held accountable. In all but a very few criminal cases, Walter said, “People make choices. If you deny them that ability, you take away their humanity and that of everyone around them, including the victim.”
Ressler had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood as John Wayne Gacy. When Ressler refused to attend the serial killer’s execution, Gacy cursed him, saying he would haunt the FBI agent from the grave. Though Walter was skeptical of Ressler’s account, there were few people not moved by Ressler’s story that he had fallen asleep in a hotel room in Houston when he was awakened by an immensely powerful unseen force that was holding him down so he couldn’t move or breathe. As he broke free with a desperate strength, he heard the TV on in the background—CNN reporting that John Wayne Gacy had just been executed.
“How does one avoid becoming the victim of a serial killer?” Fleisher asked in a rave review of the book in the Vidocq Society Journal, now published quarterly. “The conclusion I drew from Ressler’s book is not to talk to, or get into a car, with strangers, to stay away from ‘gay’ S&M bars, and not to join a cult. Follow those rules and you can reduce your risk of being murdered by a monster to near zero. Simplistic? Maybe, but it couldn’t hurt and it has worked so far for me.”
Fleisher was proudest of Vidocq Society Members’ work on major murder cases. Renowned forensic dentist and VSM Haskell Askin made