her heart home and into the restaurant business. Brooks had recently been promoted to assistant manager of the Bucks County restaurant, confirming her initial excitement at joining the restaurant chain that was owned by the Marriott Corporation, with plenty of opportunity to grow.
Brooks was alone in the restaurant long after closing on February 3, 1984, sitting in her back office, doing paperwork. She had just locked the outer glass door after letting out the two “closers”—teenagers who helped clean and prepare the restaurant for the next day; the inner glass door locked automatically behind her, offering double protection. It was after midnight, an unseasonably warm and foggy winter night.
The roar of traffic on U.S. 1 had quieted. The empty glass-walled restaurant glowed in the night, a cube of light in the misty darkness. Brooks often stayed late, focused on leaving the restaurant in perfect shape for day manager Joe Hampton.
Sometime after midnight, she heard knocking.
At about 6:15 in the morning, still dark in late winter, Hampton arrived to open up the restaurant. He was surprised to find the outer door unlocked. The inner door was locked as usual, and he turned the key and entered. Near the door was a pair of moccasin-style shoes he recognized as Terri Brooks’s. Next to the shoes were her keys. He walked into the kitchen. Large swaths of blood were smeared on the floors and walls, mixed grotesquely with the kitchen grease. Terri was behind the counter lying on her back, brutally murdered. Police were admittedly stunned by the violence of the killing; indeed, Walter thought, they failed to understand it.
Vidocq Society Member Hal Fillinger, the noted medical examiner, had performed the autopsy in 1984, and recalled every gruesome detail. It appeared from the pattern of wounds that Brooks had been trying to leave, with her winter coat on, when a violent assault sent her purse, keys, and cigarettes flying. The killer repeatedly banged her head on the stone tile floor with tremendous force, immobilizing her. Then, sitting on top of her, he began to strangle her. He fractured her hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone atop the Adam’s apple that helps produce swallowing and speech and is often crushed during strangulation. But that didn’t kill Terri Brooks. She struggled violently for her life, which prompted the killer to reach for the butcher knife. The cuts and slices on her hands indicated she had thrown her hands up in vain to stop the knife. It cut her throat and severed half of her spinal cord. A second knife thrust severed the spinal cord completely and with such force the knife blade stuck in the tile floor, pinning her throat to the ground.
Paralyzed but still alive, she must have heard the killer foraging in the restaurant supply area. He returned with the clear plastic trash bag, and wrapped it completely around her neck and head. It was Fillinger who noted the condensation inside the bag, indicating Brooks was still breathing and looking up at her attacker as he asphyxiated her.
As the corpse hovered above them in the gray light of afternoon, tall, broad-shouldered ex–major-crime homicide detective Ed Gaughan’s lantern jaw flushed in contrast to his sandy hair, the only sign he gave that he wanted to take someone out. Gaughan was friends with Sergeant Cloud, who had shared his frustration with the Brooks case while the two were watching their sons play football for Pennsbury High School. Gaughan convinced Sergeant Cloud to bring the case before the Vidocq Society.
The Falls Township Police Department threw all its resources at the crime, Cloud said. The killing made headlines in the local newspapers, and the Marriott Corporation put up a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. It quickly became evident to police that it was a “robbery gone wrong”—terribly wrong. Brooks had interrupted the robbery in progress and tried to stop it, triggering her death.
Looking for the robber who, facing resistance, had become a murderer, police interviewed fifty past and present restaurant employees. They zeroed in on an employee whom Brooks had discovered stealing from the cash drawer, and another employee at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Philadelphia who had threatened her. Both were cleared. They talked to an old boyfriend in California, and ruled him out.
They tried to link Brooks’s killing to a spate of similarly violent fast-food robberies in the region and beyond. In April 1985 at a Philadelphia Roy Rogers only twenty miles away, fourteen months later, the day