A Checklist for Murder
A WIFE AFRAID
Claire was so sure her abusive husband would kill her that she took out a life insurance policy the day she saw a lawyer about a divorce.
A DAUGHTER MAIMED
Natasha’s beautiful face and skull had been crushed by the crowbar’s blows, but her mind refused to forget who had done it.
A LAWYER THREATENED
Victoria Doom had no idea that taking on Natasha’s case would make her the target of a hit man.
A COP DETERMINED
Steve Fisk was haunted by the fates of Natasha and Claire, sworn to find the perpetrator, and determined to put him away.
A PSYCHO ON THE RUN
Robert Peernock had money, a plan, plastic surgery, and a girlfriend to help him escape … but his twisted brain had left one damning piece of evidence behind.
Contents
PART I
Monsters in the Dark
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART II
Around the Tree and Back into the Hole
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART III
The Confusers
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART IV
A Checklist for Murder
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
TORTURE: An extreme physical and mental assault on a person who has been rendered defenseless.
—
Amnesty International
CHAPTER
1
S
he lay in the seat listening to the metallic sounds as he tinkered under the Cadillac. Was it safe to move?
She still had a little physical control left, despite her cuffed hands, her bound ankles, her blindness inside the canvas hood. But long hours in captivity being force-fed a combination of alcohol and some kind of an unknown drug had served to take a severe toll. Even though she was a healthy eighteen-year-old and had always been athletic, by this point it took all her effort just to make her slim body obey her.
She reached out over her mother’s unconscious form. Slowly, she ran trembling fingers down the steering column until at last her fingertips brushed the ignition. The key was still there, but she pulled back. Could she start the car even though her hands were cuffed in front of her? Could she shift the transmission into reverse even though she couldn’t see, stomp on the gas even though her feet were tied? Most of all, could she do it fast enough to run the car over him before he heard her and scrambled out of the way? She had to try. There was no longer any doubt that he was about to kill them both. Once again she leaned over her mother, stretching her cuffed hands out toward the key.
But just as her fingertips finally reached the ignition, she realized the sounds under the car had stopped.
Sometime before 4:00
A.M.
on July 22, 1987, a motorist named John Dozier pulled over to the side of a desolate road. He peered into the early morning darkness and struggled to
focus on a jumble of twisted wreckage off the right-hand shoulder. It seemed to be a single car wreck; no one was moving at the scene.
He looked closer. A thin wisp of smoke was rising from the undercarriage of an old Cadillac resting near the side of the road. The rear of the car was still on the gravel shoulder, but the front straddled the remains of a wooden telephone pole. It appeared that the heavy ’71 sedan had rammed the pole with such force that it had splintered and collapsed. The front of the car had come to rest on top of the remains of the pole as it lay on the ground.
Dozier realized that the wreck must have happened only moments before and that he was the first to come along. He knew that on an isolated strip of road like this one, it might be hours before anyone else chanced by in the darkness.
He hurried over, opened the driver’s door of the Cadillac and discovered a petite woman lying inside. She gave no signs of life. He tried to pull her free but she was jammed under the dashboard beneath the steering wheel. On the floor beside her he could hear a female passenger moaning softly, but the door on the passenger side was jammed in place and there was nothing he could do to free the second victim either.
Then he remembered the thin wisp of smoke rising from under the car. He realized an explosion could happen at any second.
Dozier hurried away to find a phone and call for help.
At 4:25 on that same July morning, Paramedic Clyde Piehoff was sleeping through the quiet hours of a twenty-four-hour shift at Fire Station 89 in the North Hollywood area of Los Angeles when he received a radio dispatch over his hotline. The call came from the main dispatch center in downtown L.A., located five riot-proof floors below ground level. The order directed him to proceed to San Fernando Road near the Tuxford intersection in the neighboring town
of Sun Valley. Clyde was a supervisor with the rank of paramedic 3, serving all county municipalities, so the call was within his jurisdiction. He summoned his partner, Paramedic 2 Todd Carb, and their trainee, Paul Egizi. Within moments they were rolling toward the scene.
Clyde’s problems began immediately; there are two San Fernando Roads that intersect Tuxford. He made his best guess and arrived shortly afterward at what he considered the more commonly traveled of the two locations: the new strip of road, where most of the traffic could be expected to go.
There was nothing there.
Knowing he was losing precious seconds, he and his crew rushed toward old San Fernando Road, a lesser used strip of dead-end road running slightly north of a set of railroad tracks. There they finally spotted the “dispatch incident.”
Four minutes had elapsed since their call came in.
Clyde saw the first body before he and the crew had even exited their ambulance. The woman lay on the floor under the steering wheel, her back against the driver’s seat and her head slumped against the door frame. Her knees were jammed up under the dashboard, with her right arm on the floor and her left arm trailing out of the open driver’s side door and onto the ground.
He did not notice the missing section of the underside of the dash or the exposed brackets for mounting stereo equipment, because in his mind, the woman became Clyde’s patient the moment he arrived on the scene.
Visibility inside the car was a problem; the dome light was not on, even though the driver’s side door was open. His attention was already fixed on assessing her condition. But he suspected that once he reached the woman his check for vital signs would be useless; in addition to clear evidence of massive blood loss, Clyde’s patient had sizable portions of brain matter exposed just above her eyes.
After his first quick check of the woman hanging out of
the doorway, Clyde saw a second body on the floor of the passenger side. The second passenger, also a female, wasn’t moving either. He called for Todd and Paul to circle around the car to look after the second passenger while he knelt by the driver’s side passenger to continue his preliminary assessments.
The smell of gas is typical in bad car wrecks, but Clyde noticed that the odor from this wreck was unusually strong. Glancing around the interior of the car, he saw puddles of fluid on the floorboards. Alarmed that they could be dealing with an active fuel leak, Clyde quickened his pace.
In that first brief moment he had also noticed that blood was also splattered across the inside of the windshield and over the gearshift area. But there was, oddly, no damage at all to the windshield itself or the steering column.
In fact, with the exception of all that blood, the interior of the car did not appear damaged at all. At that moment he couldn’t tell if the splattered blood was from one or both of the women. But when Clyde spotted a thin leather strap, several feet long and knotted at both ends, lying across his patient’s face, he immediately began conducting his movements so as to disturb things as little as possible. He had been trained to do it that way whenever something about a simple wreck indicated that it might be a crime scene.
Meanwhile Todd and Paul were having trouble getting the passenger’s door pried open. The point of impact was on the right front of the car, but the shock had distorted metal all along the car’s right side. Quickly retrieving a manual retractor called a hayward from their unit, they began working to free the second patient.
While Clyde was occupied with his examination of the woman on the driver’s side, other details of the scene continued to strike him as strangely out of place. A partially empty bottle of whiskey lay in the driver’s footwell, but the odor inside the car was more like gas than alcohol. The driver’s
clothing was soaked, but there again the odor on the clothing was that of gasoline and not alcohol. Most of all, the driver’s head injuries were so severe, her face so bloodied and distorted, that he couldn’t even guess her age. Clyde couldn’t imagine what she might have collided with inside the car that would tear her up so badly without also showing some sign of damage to the impacted object itself.
The urgency of the situation, with the car’s interior puddled with gasoline, kept him from continuing his trauma evaluation. With nothing else to go on but his initial impressions, he noted that the driver was small and trim, with no visible signs of aging. He estimated her age to be around thirty while he quickly checked her vital signs.
At 4:35
A.M.
, Clyde pronounced his patient dead at the scene.
On the passenger side, Todd and Paul called out to Clyde that the second victim showed faint signs of life. As soon as they began to check her, leaning in the window to determine her condition, they confirmed what Clyde had already noticed; there was a strong odor of gas inside the car. It was pooled on the floor around the second victim, soaking through her clothes.
John Dozier had returned to the scene and stood off in the background watching the action, and at that moment he called out a warning to the driver of a street sweeper from a nearby gravel company who had pulled his rig over to protect the scene from traffic. Dozier directed the driver’s attention to the source of smoke under the car. When Clyde hurried around to assist his partners in removing the survivor, the street sweeper’s driver relayed the warning of fire danger to Clyde.
Clyde dropped to his knees and peered under the car. A piece of rope that he would later describe as looking like a “wick” hung from the undercarriage below the gas tank
area. The rope had been partially burned. The end of the rope still smoldered.
The smoldering rope made it imperative to immediately get the surviving young woman out and away from the car. It was also vital to get an engine company on the scene for fire-related backup. The deceased driver would have to remain in the car. Clyde ran to his unit and put out the call for additional aid, then rushed back to help Todd and Paul remove the survivor.