Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,129
manager opened up to find the night manager stabbed to death, the safe empty. They contacted police in Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, where similar crimes had occurred, and interrogated suspects in all similar robberies they could find. On the tenth anniversary of the crime, a local television station crime watch program featured the case. The police received “lots of calls and our investigators ended up all over the place,” to no avail.
Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, Sergeant Cloud concluded his presentation. “We appreciate your ears,” he said. “We also appreciate your brains.” The room seemed to exhale, gathering itself for the inquiry. The first suggestions from Vidocq members focused on DNA testing, a technology unknown in 1984. Could the killer’s DNA be harvested from the victim’s body and articles found at the scene, including the knife and hair follicles in her hand? Cloud would look into it.
Fleisher, Bender, Walter, Gaughan, and Fred Bornhofen whispered among themselves and called out their opinions almost as one. The consensus was the police department had botched the focus of the case from the beginning, fourteen years earlier.
“Initially the investigators seemed to have gone after robbers,” Gaughan said. “Any time somebody was locked up who had committed a robbery like that, they were there interrogating the guy. They basically didn’t focus the investigation properly. A robber wants money, to get in and get out; he’ll kill if he has to but this was a more complex type of murder.”
Bornhofen wrote later, “It’s overkill and not the type of murder done by a robber. Even a rank amateur like me could see the case for what it was.”
Gaughan, looking sympathetically at his friend Sergeant Cloud, said the police had to start over. They had to interview everyone again, as if Terri Brooks had just been killed. This time, the Vidocq Society would be there to help.
Walter stood. “My colleagues are quite right. Robbers don’t swath the head of a victim in plastic. As it happens, this is the peculiar signature of a very complicated and dark personality subtype. It’s not a robbery at all. It’s a murder. The murderer staged the robbery to throw the police off. He succeeded, until now. We know quite a lot about the killer already.”
Walter paused. “In the information game, answers are meaningless. You have to ask the right questions, and the question is: Who cared enough to kill her three times?”
His rakish smile pierced the gloom.
“For whom did Terri Brooks unlock the door?”
• CHAPTER 44 •
FROM HEAVEN TO HELL
The sweet hymn to Jesus awakened Walter abruptly. He was snoozing in the parlor of his Greek Revival mansion when the glorious notes of “Lift High the Cross” floated in on the spring air. He put on his glasses and stood on the porch glaring at the offending Gothic tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, diagonally across the street. It was time to teach the Episcopalians a lesson.
Wearing jeans and a red sport shirt, he pulled the Briggs & Stratton mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and mowed the front lawn—as he did every Sunday when the choir reached full song, whether the grass needed it or not. He was “quite pleased” as the rattling old mower drowned out the choir, and the clatter crossed the street to the opened stained-glass windows of the stone church. “The Episcopalians are perfectly loathsome neighbors,” he later wrote to a friend. “When they get going on Sunday I must answer back with as loud a noise as I can muster.”
“Have you finished being psychopathic yet?” Stoud grinned as he stepped on the porch, where the thin man was sitting, his face a sheen of sweat, sipping an iced tea in the sudden quiet of a late spring morning.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it, that people want to sing in church on Sunday morning?”
“Indeed.” Walter laughed. “As you know, I don’t make a very good victim. And I’m not feeling terribly charitable toward Christians at the moment.”
Walter had just returned from Lubbock, Texas, where he’d watched Tim Smith, a devout Evangelical Christian, be tried for the murder of Scott Dunn as Leisha Hamilton’s accomplice, a year after Hamilton was convicted of Dunn’s murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Smith’s attorney had portrayed the cold-blooded killer as a clean-cut, young, Christian family man, with a wife and three-year-old son, who had never done wrong until he met the conniving Hamilton. Members of Smith’s church had mobbed the courthouse, calling for Christians all over