By Reason of Insanity (36 page)

THOSE SAME weeks also saw Senator Stoner going national along with Vincent Mungo. He had made it. His name was becoming a household word in the West, he had conquered the Midwest and the central states, and he would soon do the same in the East. He was being asked to talk in New York and two TV appearances had already been scheduled. The media smelled a winner. If things kept going right he was a cinch to run for the United States Senate. Or was it governor?

Capital punishment had really caught fire. The timing was perfect, everything clicked. Mungo had helped of course, but he was no longer needed. Stoner hoped they got the son of a bitch fast, He should not be allowed to run around killing women and violating their sacred bodies. Maybe the police were inadequate, maybe they needed prodding. Perhaps he should look into that angle. It might be good politics.

ON OCTOBER 4 Bishop arrived in Chicago. He found a cheap hotel on Dearborn and then set out to find the city. He didn’t rent a car; unlike the West and Southwest, public transportation was adequate. Nor did he want to use Daniel Long’s identity any further except in an emergency. By now they could have discovered what he had done. He needed a new identity and he intended to get one as soon as possible.

Meanwhile he rode the local buses and trains, walked the downtown area, ate in small restaurants on side streets. Chicago was incomprehensible to him. Big, sprawling, unknowable. Everything was congested and jammed together, there were people everywhere. It was all a bit frightening, yet he found the movement of the city, and its anonymity, exciting as well. He felt as though he could remain lost for a hundred years, a thousand, and he wondered if New York would be like that.

ON THAT same day in California, Sheriff Oates returned Daniel Long’s call to Forest City. He listened quietly as Long told him of the credit clerk and the mysterious stranger. Could it mean something? In five minutes Oates was speaking to the clerk. What day was it? Where did the call come from? What exactly was said?

He called Long again and got his birthplace and date. Then a call to San Jose. Did a Daniel Long request a birth certificate within the past three months? Yes? Where was it sent?

Oates could hardly believe it. The first concrete clue to Vincent Mungo’s new identity. Maybe. He felt like Columbus discovering America. Then he remembered that Columbus was seeking the Orient.

He picked up the phone to call Los Angeles.

Ten

THE TEN days that shook Chicago were among the happiest in the young life of Thomas William Bishop. He was twentyfive and a half years old and had not known freedom until exactly three months before when he had walked away from a locked building behind a big wall on a dark and dangerous night. After years of waiting and months of watching he had seized the moment—rather, had made his own kind of moment, from which there would be no turning back. With the first fall of the axe his new life had begun, and he gratefully accepted the deadly mission for which he believed he was destined. More than that, he embraced it and the sense of freedom that came with his new existence. No longer would he have to sleep and wake, eat and fast, live and die by someone else’s clock, always in the shadow of the big gray wall. No more would he say yes sir and no sir and lower his eyes and hold his tongue and agree with everything said by anyone who said it. Now he would do the talking, he would make the rules regarding himself and he would do whatever struck his fancy. From now on they were the ones who had to be careful, all of them. He was the master of reality, and he held life and death in his hands.

The sense of power was absolute and he enjoyed it absolutely. In three months he had made his way across two-thirds of the country, alone and in complete control, learning as he went, striking as he left. His wake was strewn with the butchered bodies of the enemy and as in any war of diabolic purpose, no mercy was expected and none given. From the initial murder at Willows, through the slaughter in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the war machine rolled relentlessly eastward, moving inexorably across the face of the land, unmindful of state boundaries or local jurisdiction. As the death toll mounted, as the fearful destruction increased, authorities on all governmental levels sounded the alarm. A Texas mayor deputized all males in his city. A state’s attorney general alerted the militia. The governor of Louisiana was asked to call out the National Guard. In Memphis police went on double duty, and surrounding towns imposed temporary curfews. In St. Louis all leaves of law-enforcement personnel were canceled. In a hundred cities and a thousand towns from the West Coast to the Mississippi River men were regarded suspiciously, stopped for questioning, detained for hours; in some cases, beaten and arrested. It was no time for strangers who looked anything like Vincent Mungo or accosted women or couldn’t prove their identity or ran away or acted belligerent or talked funny or even walked around.

As the bloody trail lengthened so did the coverage by the news media, most especially television. Their appetites whetted by the prodigious publicity given the Charles Manson murders of the previous year, TV newsmen scurried about in a frantic effort to report every bizarre detail of this fresh sensation. In news circles it was an even bet at the moment that the mungo-maniac would go bigger than Manson. The story had all the ingredients: it was occurring in more than one city or state, it was affecting in one way or another a large share of the audience, and it had the forbidding elements of mental illness and violent sexuality. In short, it had everything to draw national attention and as network coverage increased, along with column space in newspapers and magazines, the nation eventually came to realize, or was led to believe, that it was locked into a secret guerrilla war with an unseen enemy who sought total destruction of at least half its population. That the enemy was one man, if indeed it was only one man, which many seemed to doubt, made the struggle no less fearful. Like the plague, the enemy was moving at will, covering more and more area, striking wherever and whenever it pleased. The outer fringes of the populace were ready to believe anything. Some science-fiction aficionados saw it as the beginning of an invasion of alien beings from another galaxy, a vastly different life form that had no use for female earthlings. Others, mostly men, saw it as just retribution for the sins of mankind.

Law-enforcement officials nevertheless regarded it as strictly a police matter. The FBI was involved, on direct orders of the United States Attorney General; the investigation bureaus of a dozen central and western states were coordinated in a joint effort, as were police departments in all the struck cities. Thus far nothing new had surfaced beyond the fact that Vincent Mungo, rightly or wrongly, thought Caryl Chessman his father and had now taken over his father’s role in avenging himself against women. The letter to California State Senator Stoner proved that. The initials “V. M.” had been crossed out and the name Chessman written underneath, FBI lab reports concluded that the handwriting was the same as in the letters sent to
Newstime
. All were regarded as genuine. As to present appearance, plastic surgery had been ruled out so police and special agents at airports and train and bus depots in the larger cities concentrated on young men with heavy beards. These were politely asked to show proof of identity; if none was forthcoming they were held until identified by others. Only the clean-shaven who did not resemble Mungo were allowed to pass un ch e eked.

The Daniel Long thread, discovered by Sheriff Oates, was just beginning to be unraveled by California authorities. In a matter of days Los Angeles police, working back from the address to which a copy of Long’s birth certificate was sent from San Jose, would open a bank safedeposit box containing the birth certificate, dated November 12, 1943, and a picture of a middle-aged woman. Identification of the woman as Velma Adams, a beauty-salon owner who was found murdered on a road between Yuba City and Sacramento in mid-July, would add still another victim to Vincent Mungo’s growing list.

Police would also find a savings and checking account in the name of Daniel Long in a different bank. A further search would produce a record of a driver’s license issued to Daniel Long in Los Angeles at the end of July. The picture on the license application would show a young man with a full beard. A car-rental clerk in Phoenix would describe Daniel Long as a bearded man wearing dark wraparound sunglasses. The conclusion would be inescapable. Vincent Mungo was traveling as Daniel Long, with a complete set of identification including a driver’s license and credit card and checkbook. His new identity, sent to the proper authorities, would not be given to newsmen for a few days so that Mungo might be caught somewhere posing as Long. If not, the story would then be circulated in the hope that Mungo, forced to discard the Long name, would have no other sets of identification. Without papers, a bearded young man, he would soon be caught. Maybe.

For the moment, however, all that was known about the California maniac was that he had been in and out of mental hospitals for much of his young life and was now free again and killing women without apparent design or pity.

Free again! Lucky me, thought Bishop standing on a Chicago street corner on his first day in the city. Free again after a lifetime of madness and pain! His eyes took in the buildings overhead, the sidewalks crowded with people, the endless streams of cars. He had never felt so alive, so exhilarated. His sense of freedom was total in the midst of such huge crowds, and he suddenly realized that he was more invisible in a big city than he could ever be on a deserted mountainside or forest range or even in a small country town. Chicago was unlike anything he had ever seen. Los Angeles was nothing like it, nor any other city he had passed through. All of them had space and the space always swallowed up the people. But here the hordes of people dwarfed everything; even the buildings seemed to bend toward them. He stood still for a long moment allowing the world to pass around him. Soon he saw that it was as nameless and faceless as he, and he began to feel that at last he had found the kind of place in which he could survive. A big city. Surrounded by millions of people virtually living together yet unknown to one another, with at least half of them the enemy.

For several days Bishop explored the Loop area and rode on the elevated trains. He walked through Grant Park and gazed at the hundreds of boats in Chicago Harbor. He visited the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum of Natural History and the Adler Planetarium. He watched the planes take off from Meigs Field. He rode the sightseeing boats on Lake Michigan and viewed the Chicago skyline. He walked the length of the Gold Coast along Michigan Avenue and then onto Lake Shore Drive with its endless luxury apartment houses and its small beaches. On the fourth day he found the Oak Street beach. The air was cool and there were few strollers as he came up from the underpass. She was sitting alone on a bench near the curve in the walk. He sat nearby and soon struck up a conversation. He was new to Chicago, coming in from San Francisco for a visit. It seemed like a nice town but kind of cold to people alone. She smiled. She was alone too. In from Milwaukee on a two-day business trip. He said he had never been to Milwaukee. She told him he wasn’t missing much.

“You staying around here, are you?”

She nodded, indicating the Drake Hotel across the street. She had a meeting in the afternoon and then would be free until the following morning, when business again reared its ugly head before an early evening flight back home.

Bishop said he had some free time too.

She had told him of her schedule because he looked good to her at the moment. He was young and clean in appearance and he had the nicest smile. She was afraid of only two things: dirt and poverty. Dirt brought disease and poor people brought misery, and she had seen enough of both in her life. As she glanced at the young man now seated next to her she saw no dirt and smelled no poverty. Beyond her twin fears Lilian Brothers was an emancipated woman of twenty-nine who took her pleasure as it came. She was fond of good food and expensive clothes and capable young men. Unfortunately she couldn’t always tell a man’s capabilities by his looks but she was almost always willing to give it a try. Unmarried, she supported her parents, who lived with her, though she often stayed elsewhere overnight. In Chicago, to which she came occasionally in her career as a successful buyer, she knew some people but lately they had begun to bore her with their sameness. She longed for a fresh experience.

After further pleasant talk they agreed to meet that evening for dinner and drinks.

During the afternoon Bishop took care of some business of his own. He first changed a half dozen hundred-dollar bills into tens and twenties at different banks in order not to draw attention to himself. There was no real danger because the bills were old and had no consecutive serial numbers.

Afterward he went to a large post office that had tables set up for the use of customers. In the adjoining trash barrels he found three envelopes addressed to a Jay Cooper of Chicago. In one of the envelopes was a statement of earnings and contributions from a workers’ pension plan. On the official-looking form were Cooper’s name and post office box address, his birth date and social security number. Bishop stuffed some folded advertisements from the barrel into the other two envelopes and slipped all three letters in his pocket.

His next stop was a branch of the First National Bank of Chicago, where he opened a savings account with fifty dollars in the name of Jay Cooper. He showed the letters as proof of identity and the pension-plan form for proof of his Social Security number. He then went to the local administration office with the form and received a new card, since his old one had been stolen along with everything else in his wallet. Imagine! Mugged in early evening on a Southside Chicago street! He just didn’t know what the town was coming to anymore. Neither did the clerk, who sympathized with his sentiments and just casually glanced at the bankbook as proof of identity.