Evil Season (27 page)

Grant summed it up for Murphy. At that point Murphy's game plan was to go to Oregon and cut hair. Murphy said yes. Grant wanted to know, if that was the plan, why did he stash his haircutting tools? Murphy said they were stashed so that he would have access to them when he got to Oregon.

Grant became blunt: “If your barber equipment didn't have anything to do with our killing, why is it a big secret where it's stashed?”

Murphy said, “The stash contains stolen items.”

Grant said he didn't care about the stolen items. In the overall scheme of things, the stolen items were small. He was interested in the stash because barber instruments were
sharp.

The detective had talked to people who knew Murphy and they said those instruments were special to him. “We don't throw away things that are special to us,” Grant added.

“Well, I did,” Murphy said, raising his right hand as if taking an oath. The police knew he was lying. He'd already admitted once to stashing the tools, now he was reverting to his earlier lie that he had dumped all of his belongings.

“Would you dump them if they had evidence on them?”

“Not at all,” Murphy said, shaking his head with sincerity.

“Then you wouldn't mind telling us where you dumped them.”

“I dumped them, piece by piece, a little here, a little there, down the road. . . .”

“Where?”

“In the garbage at a bus terminal in Tallahassee, on Tennessee Street, to be honest with you.”

“You went from Sarasota to Houston via Tallahassee ?” Opitz asked.

“Yes.”

“And why did you get rid of the stuff piecemeal?” Grant asked.

“I got tired of carrying. I was getting my load lighter and lighter as I went along.”

Grant asked Murphy to itemize the things he got rid of. Murphy said all of his clippers, and maybe eight to ten pairs of scissors.

“Uh-huh. According to Dean, you had another item you're not mentioning.”

Murphy said, “Straight razor.”

“Yeah,” Grant replied, with a raised eyebrow.

“It was just a little thing for giving shaves,” Murphy explained. It would have made a lousy weapon because the blade was so thin and easily breakable.

Grant said, “You know there are some tough questions that I have to ask you.”

“Ask away,” Murphy said.

Grant shifted the subject away from the razor to Murphy's apparent need, in later years, to molest his clients as he cut their hair.

Murphy said he thought the touchy-feely behavior was part of the spiritual process he was going through. He'd touched many more than the ones he had gotten caught touching. “I've touched hundreds,” Murphy bragged.

The sexual touching was done after placing the subject in a hypnotic trance. The touching itself was
so subtle
that the great majority of them never realized they were being touched. He was a “master hypnotist.”

And that wasn't where his powers ended. He was able to amplify the hypnosis with his spiritual connection. People said that you couldn't hypnotize a person who didn't want to be hypnotized, but that wasn't true, according to Murphy. The spiritual connection allowed him to overrule that so-called rule. Unfortunately, his powers were just shy of being perfect. Once every 150 times or so, the person realized they were being touched.

“When you touch them, what do you do?”

“I feel up their titties. I even kissed some of them on the back of the neck.”

He got to the point where he could hypnotize more than one person simultaneously. “I could put a whole room out,” he bragged.

He could feel up titties right in front of people, but they wouldn't be able to see him do it. One woman, he recalled, didn't go under. She put up with the touching at first, like she was paralyzed, but then she ran out of the shop.

“I saw her crying, out in front of the shop,” Murphy added.

“That was in Sarasota?”

“Brandon. I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh, I got caught.'”

“When did you start with the touching?”

“Autumn of 2003.”

He didn't just do it when he was cutting hair, either. He'd do it wherever. He'd feel up the lady in front of him on the grocery checkout line.

“Did you have specific and vivid memories of feeling up the clients?”

Murphy said he did. He was working in a shop at the time in a mall that had a Walmart.

Grant said he didn't like the word, but he thought this act fit in with a pattern of sexual “deviances” that Murphy enjoyed. The various deviances Murphy practiced were known as “paraphilia.” It included sexual contact with people who were unaware, wife swapping, voyeurism.

“Was it your ultimate goal to be able to hypnotize people to the point where you could secretly have sex with them?”

The question caused a short surge of energy in the prisoner. Murphy said yes. “That's my goal, my
dream.
I got to where I was very good at it. I'm not going to tell you how good.”

In the long run it was his spiritual connection more than his hypnotism skills that allowed him to get away with what he did. It was a God-given thing. He liked to call it “the Power.” He'd gotten to the point where he could “pretty much do anything” sexually.

“Kind of like being a pickpocket,” Grant said—and Murphy liked the analogy.

Murphy admitted he was a voyeur; it was true. “I watched another guy fuck my wife and it turned me on,” he said. “And I've watched other guys fuck their wives as well.”

“What are your other interests?” Grant asked.

“I'm pretty straightlaced, but I like the gothic chicks—you know, the ones who look like vampires and stuff, dress all in black.”

“Are you familiar with necrophilia?”

“Uh, no. I heard that name, though.”

“It means someone that derives pleasure from sex with people that are dead. Ever have any thoughts or fantasies like that?”

“No.”

“Because those gothic chicks, they're always, you know, kind of pale. Like they're dead.”

“Those girls get a bad rap. I met one once—she was a devout Christian.”

“Can't judge a book by its cover,” Grant said. “Some people do like sex with the dead, like to have sex in a cemetery, in the back of a hearse. I'm not judging them. Whatever floats their boat.”

Opitz added, “Some of them just have their sexual partner lay there still and pretend they're dead.”

Murphy was silent, just taking it all in.

“What about bondage?” Grant asked.

Murphy responded quickly: “I'm not so much into that, and I'll tell you why. . . .”

His wife Paula had had a bondage experience before they met. She had gotten drunk with a guy and went home with him. He tied her up and said he was going to rape her.

“Maybe, I'm not sure, he told her he was going to kill her. She got away from the guy. I don't know if he passed out or what. Short time after that, this guy did rape and kill a girl, and Paula testified against him at the trial, put his ass away,” Murphy said.

“You have any personal experience with bondage?”

“I only allowed one person to handcuff me, if you don't count cops,” Murphy said. “It didn't do much for me.”

“You ever use bondage on anyone else?”

“No. Well, one time, sort of.”

He met this girl and she went into the bathroom. She came out with a little body outfit on and dangling handcuffs. She tried to handcuff him, but he turned the table on her and put them on her, just one of them on her leg. He wasn't sure that counted as bondage.

“I've never fantasized about handcuffs, if that's what you mean,” he concluded.

“What kind of fantasies do you have?” Grant asked.

“Multiple partners. Wives. I love doing other people's wives.”

It was two pleasures in one, Murphy explained. First of all, it was sex, but it was also the joy of
taking a sacred object,
something that is sacred to someone else. He was turned on both by other men's wives and by watching other men with his wife. “I'm no hypocrite,” he added.

Grant wanted to know how Murphy went about recruiting a man to have sex with his wife so he could watch.

Murphy said the first few guys he asked said no. Then one day he was cutting this guy's hair and he asked if he'd like to come home and have a threesome. The guy said sure. Then he called Paula, told her he'd gotten a handsome guy to do it. The guy ended up turning Paula on; they had him over two, three times.

“When you say ‘threesome,' does that mean that you participated as well?” Grant asked.

“Oh yeah, we doubled. I would do her some, and then he would do her some.”

“From the way you talked before, I thought you just sat there and watched.”

Murphy shook his head. Sometimes they would take turns having oral sex with her. Sometimes Paula would give Murphy oral sex, while the other guy was having vaginal intercourse with her.

Grant asked if Murphy had contact with the other guy during the threesome.

“Uh, yeah, but it was just random. I never actually, you know . . .”

He put a condom on one guy once, but that was earlier. Back when he was in his twenties, he had been the third with a married couple in their forties. They had had a picnic; then they went back to the couple's mobile home and got it on. That time the husband gave Murphy oral sex. But he didn't feel like a guy with bisexual tendencies. It was more just a means to the end, to the real fantasy, which was to have sex with the guy's wife.

“Do you ever have sexual fantasies about possessing someone totally?” Grant asked. “What would you consider the ultimate?”

“I guess the ultimate would be to have that individual anytime I wanted. I could do it to them again and again, whenever I wanted, and they wouldn't realize it.”

“Did you ever get to that point?”

“I haven't. But I have engaged in sex with people when they didn't realize it.”

“Did you ever have an occasion when you thought they were hypnotized and you were about to have sex with them, and all of a sudden they said no or something bad happened?” Opitz asked.

“There were times when the hypnotism wasn't working as well as I thought and I had to quickly go back to whatever else I was doing, drinking coffee or whatever.”

Murphy decided he'd talked enough on the subject. He wasn't going to give them anything that might result in a rape charge. He explained that this was one of those times when he was “backing off.”

 

 

At this juncture Grant switched subjects. “Let me take you back to January 16, 2004.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know where you were that day?”

“I'm not good with dates. I have thought about it, trying to determine my alibi, but nothing specific comes to mind. All I know is that I was following my routine. If I wasn't at work, I was riding my bicycle or taking a walk or eating.”

“Where would you ride?”

“Around my neighborhood.”

“We've showed your picture around, and people remember seeing you in downtown Sarasota—in places you claimed you hadn't been.”

“If they could positively identify me, I might have been downtown,” Murphy said with a laugh. Then: “Yeah, I've been downtown. Might've stopped for coffee—coffee shop and a bookstore, right there on the corner.”

“You remember when that was?”

“January.”

“The sixteenth?”

“Could've been. I don't know. I didn't peddle my artwork.”

“Other than haircutting, you work anyplace else in Sarasota?”

“No.”

“You tell your sister-in-law you were working for a lady in an art gallery?”

“Right,” Murphy said, remembering.

“You said you were helping a lady who had a couple of grown kids, and she was going to help you sell some of your art, right?”

“Yeah, I made a big elaborate lie, said the lady had a bunch of artists working for her, and that I rented space there. . . .”

“She doesn't remember that part,” Grant said.

Murphy tried to explain. He said he was telling a lot of lies at that time because he didn't want people to know he was planning major thefts and to leave Sarasota.

Grant said, “You're being inconsistent.” Earlier, Murphy had said the reason he was leaving Sarasota was that he was all touchy-feely with the women whose hair he cut, and the sheriff's department had come over to confront him.

Murphy said they were both true. He'd already planned on leaving Sarasota before the lady detective came to visit. That just hurried up the process. He was already getting rid of his stuff in preparation for going mobile.

Grant asked Murphy why he bled so much. There was blood on his backpack, on his fanny pack, blood all over. Murphy said he had a problem with sores that didn't heal.

“I have wounds that haven't healed in years. They start to itch, I scratch, and pretty soon I'm bleeding again,” Murphy said. There was another reason for all of the blood, however. He cut himself while committing a burglary. It happened when he broke the window to get in.

Grant said he'd noticed the scab picking. It grew worse when Murphy was alone, but he could sort of control it when he knew someone was watching. Grant said it seemed like compulsive behavior to him, and Murphy agreed.

“I've been doing this for eight, ten years—picking that same spot.”