makeshift weapons were found lying near her body, smeared with her blood.
At nine that morning, two passing students found Wilson’s body in the stairwell, on a landing eleven steps below street level.
As Snyder spoke, Fleisher passed around additional pictures of Wilson’s body, a bloodstain found in the computer room and the type of computer she was working on when she died, and the type of sneakers she was wearing. White Reeboks. White socks.
Fleisher joined Snyder at the podium and opened the floor to questions.
“What about the security guard? ” Fleisher himself started it off.
“Dickson was an immediate suspect,” Snyder said. He was the obvious choice. In police interviews, he was shaky about his whereabouts during the course of the evening. But he had an alibi: He told the other guard on duty he’d been talking on the phone with his girlfriend and forgot to escort Wilson to her car. He failed part of a polygraph test, but polygraphs are inadmissible in court. “We never had enough to arrest him,” Snyder said.
The questions came in a torrent.
“Was there a janitor on duty at the time?”
No, Snyder said.
“Were there any arrests for burglary made on campus that night?”
No.
“Have you tried DNA testing?” Heads turned to Halbert Fillinger, the veteran Philadelphia medical examiner. “There may be traces of the killer’s skin nuclei on the cord he used to strangle her if he gripped it tightly enough,” he said. “That residue could be tested for the killer’s DNA.”
Puzzled looks went around the room. DNA testing had not been available when Wilson was killed in 1984; nor was it a well-known technology eight years later. “It’s a long shot,” the Los Angeles Times reporter concluded. “But right now Snyder is willing to clutch on to any suggestion. He’s frustrated by his inability to move the case forward.”
After half an hour, Snyder slumped at the podium. The question-and-answer session was winding down, and he’d gotten little more than free lunch, moral support, and a few interesting ideas.
Suddenly Walter, whose habit, like the anchorman of a relay, was to take the baton at the end, spoke up. He frowned and adjusted his owlish black glasses on his aquiline nose.
“If I might offer an opinion,” he began crisply, “the key to the case is the absence of the victim’s shoes and socks.”
Snyder nodded. “We know the missing footwear was significant. We just didn’t know how.”
Walter nodded. “There is no robbery, yet her white Reeboks and white athletic socks are missing. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Not waiting for an answer, he raised more questions:
“The crucial question is, what is the value of the killing? What did he propose to get? Since he didn’t sexually assault her, what value was it? He tells us by the absence of the shoes and socks. He doesn’t want money. She’s still wearing her wristwatch. He doesn’t want a fuck. He wants the shoes. He’s a foot fetishist.”
Murmurs swept the room.
“Do foot fetishists kill for it?” a police officer asked.
“No, not often,” Walter acknowledged. “A foot fetish is a paraphilia, a sexual deviance. Afraid to engage a living and breathing sex partner, the fetishist uses the shoe as a stand-in for anyone his imagination can conjure. He gains a secondary or tertiary level of sexual satisfaction through sniffing and feeling and touching and rubbing the shoe, and maybe masturbating with it on him.”
To titters of amusement, Walter said, “Foot fetishes may be bizarrely amusing, but they can be very powerful and damaging. This is why the Chinese bound their women’s feet into a shape they could slip their dick into, and there was so much resistance to change. The whole culture was bound by the power and fantasy of this fetish.”
Walter quickly sketched his view of the crime. The killer is obsessed with women’s shoes; he collects them, masturbates over them. In all likelihood, he probably can’t even sustain an erection around a real woman. “It’s the representation, not the reality, he craves.” He has noticed Wilson before and her white Reeboks. He’s probably never killed anyone before, but his fantasy is escalating from merely stealing someone’s shoes to confronting the wearer.
Lost in his fantasy, somewhat akin to the Gentleman Rapist, he believes himself irresistible to women. Once he reveals his charms she’s going to say, “Where have you been all my life.” A large, powerful man, he intimidates Wilson when he enters the computer room, finding her alone. “He tries to chat her up for sex, or to go somewhere with him, form