Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,71

Merrifield, Virginia, about ten miles west of Arlington. Berg, a dark-haired young woman wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, was a highly disciplined IRS agent and a habitual runner. She was a reserved woman from Wisconsin, a devout Christian, gave anonymously to charity, and dreamed of writing children’s books. She hadn’t an enemy in the world, police thought.

But at 6:30 that morning, just a few minutes into her jog, she was shot six times in the back with a handgun. She ran a few steps before collapsing and died where she fell, on the grass in front of an American Automobile Association building, where her body was discovered by a passing motorist. A single assassin apparently ambushed her, for reasons unknown. “She was executed by an excellent shot who emptied the gun on her,” Gill told the VSMs. “Someone really wanted Heidi Berg dead.”

He assigned Agent Rice and eight other veteran IRS agents in Virginia to the case. Rice became obsessed, spending parts of vacations working on the murder.

The crucial question hadn’t changed in six years: Who wanted to kill Heidi Berg? Police had no idea. The murder made no sense. As Fairfax County prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. put it, “Of all the people who jog in Fairfax County, you wouldn’t find many less likely to be the target of a homicide.” They even suspected a professional assassin may have killed the wrong woman.

Gill didn’t see it that way. “There were thousands of reasons someone would want to kill Heidi Berg,” he said, “each one printed with George Washington’s portrait.”

Heidi Berg was an IRS revenue officer, a difficult, dangerous job, Gill said. She was essentially an unarmed, civilian bill collector for the IRS. “When people really don’t pay their taxes and have had a lot of opportunities, letters, the revenue officers have to go out and knock on doors and do seizures,” Gill said. “Everybody hates the IRS, and if you say ‘bill collector for IRS’ you’re doubly hated. We had a high incidence of threats against revenue officers, and a few assaults.

“Naturally,” Gill said, “we assumed the killing was tied to her work.” In fact, Berg had recently been threatened in her job as a revenue officer based in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia. The threats had seemed serious enough that she received a transfer to the Washington, D.C., office and a less contentious job as program analyst.

But it was a dead end. “We pretty much exhausted the idea that it was job-related. We were reasonably sure it wasn’t anybody in her case files.” Then they found entries in Berg’s diary about a secret boyfriend, unknown to her friends or family. Her secret boyfriend was an FBI supervisor, a married man. Agents got excited when they learned the bullets that killed Berg were of “the same caliber issued by the FBI at the time,” Gill said. “It looked very promising. We went down that alley aggressively.”

FBI internal security gave the potential suspect a polygraph test, but it was inconclusive. Agents also gave polygraph tests to the man’s wife and his son, who was off at college. “It ruined the guy’s life for a while,” Gill said. “Bad luck for him that she maintained a diary.” The FBI supervisor was eliminated as a suspect. Another dead end.

“It’s a very frustrating case,” Gill said. “We had ten good agents in that office and a lot of money to spend. But we couldn’t get anywhere.”

So who killed Heidi Berg?

Richard Walter cleared his throat to speak, and Gill leaned forward. “Everyone seems to think if she’s pretty and young it was sexually driven,” Walter said. “I don’t see evidence for that. The killing is consistent with the angry taxpayer theory—Heidi is just disposed of, thrown away like trash, a killing all about power, which is what money represents. The gun is all power. But if everyone in her case files has been ruled out, the probability is she is a stranger to the killer. She was there and he had the needs and weapon and did her, a variant form of a drive-by shooting.”

The group fell silent. But why kill her? Bender asked. Walter frowned. “He may have tried to put the make on her and she said no, and he didn’t have the ability or testicles to take her down, so he satisfies himself with the gun. It’s also possible that he’s impotent or whatever else and that’s the most he can do, he feels isolated and he wants to take somebody out,