Evil Season (28 page)

“I believe you're hypnotizing yourself, because you're touching yourself all the time.”

“Well, I don't know about that,” Murphy said with a laugh.

Grant said Murphy also had a habit of sticking his hands down into his pants when no one was looking. Murphy said he picked that up in jail because it was cold, and it was a way to keep his hands warm.

“I don't have a hard-on when I do it,” Murphy added. “It's just a little nervous habit I picked up.”

“It's compulsive,” Grant said.

“Yeah, sure,” Murphy said, “like people who blink their eyes too much.”

Grant shifted suddenly to the crux of the situation: “In relation to our case, I was wondering if we've gotten to a point in time when we could handle the truth.”

“I wasn't going to share this with everyone, because it has to do with my spiritual calling and it's going to turn a lot of people against me. But at the same time it may be time for me to start sharing. I've been forming my own religion, you know. I believe there is a god beyond the God in the Bible.”

The cops were impatient with Murphy's evasive jibber-jabber.

“Okay,” Grant said, “but getting back to our crime, in the gallery, you said you couldn't handle the truth of what happened there. You said you couldn't tell us everything about that incident.”

“I don't recall referring to that gallery. If you took it that way, it's not how I meant it.”

“Okay, because you know, we're curious about what happened. We know, because of the physical evidence, that it is true, that it happened. But cops are not always looking for what happened, but also
why
it happened, so we can make sense of the whole thing.”

“I'm insisting adamantly today that I was never in that gallery and I never killed that woman. I'm sticking to that story and I'm insisting I'm not guilty.” Murphy laughed and said, “I'm also insisting I'll walk away a free man for this.”

“We could disagree on that,” Grant said, not laughing. “There comes a point when denial is ridiculous. I have a pretty good idea what happened. I'm more interested in the why.”

“I am not going to admit to this murder.”

“You're doing what you have to do for your protection. But if it gets to the point where denial is ridiculous, I'd appreciate you discussing with me the why.”

“I can pretty much promise you that I never will.” Murphy laughed again.

Opitz reentered the conversation. He said that Murphy had written a letter to his brother. The letter contained some interesting things. “You said, ‘I create life in the missions. I am thankful everything I do will be justified.' What were you talking about there?”

Murphy said he was talking about the hypnosis and touching and things like that.

Grant said, “Every religion at some point has something to do with sacrifice. What happened in the gallery could be interpreted as a sacrifice. Would your god justify what happened in the gallery? Would religious sacrifice be a valid reason for someone to die?”

“‘Sacrifice' is your word. I never mentioned that.”

“I'm just saying, generally . . .”

Murphy explained his religion. He was the coordinator between his new god—he didn't have a name for the new god yet, and the God of the Bible, and of Jesus, and of Satan.

“I deal with all of them.” Heaven and hell had been destroyed. “All of mankind is in prison in the new hell, including myself.”

Murphy's job was to help the inhabitants of the new hell, who had previously been in the old heaven, to be free. “I help in their release efforts.”

Grant said it didn't make sense. How could he be serving the same religion one minute by committing selfless acts, and later by committing selfish acts of chaos?

Murphy said it might seem like a contradiction, but—as far as he was concerned—it was all part of the same process.

Grant said that in an upscale neighborhood like downtown Sarasota, a murder in an art gallery could be considered chaos.

Murphy said he didn't kill that woman, but he agreed with the premise that the murder was chaotic. Everything he knew about the murder came from what he'd read in the papers or from video clips on TV. He'd seen pictures of computers being confiscated from the gallery and the body being carried out.

Grant said he knew that the photo of the confiscated computers ran in the paper, because he, in fact, had been the one carrying the computers. “I also know for a fact that there are no photos, no video, of the body being removed.”

“Well, maybe I just thought I saw it,” Murphy said.

Opitz asked, “Is it possible that you were down there and just happened to see it?”

“No, uh-uh,” Murphy said.

Grant said, “One thing I will tell you is that there was a camera that was installed inside the gallery after the murder. Would it surprise you if I told you there is somebody on there who looks very much like you? Did you ever wander by there afterward and look through the window?”

“Nope.”

“You know that there is software for facial recognition, right?”

(Grant was bluffing, of course. The recording had been almost useless. You could tell that there was an adult male looking in the window, but that was about it.)

“I used to be a military photographer—Soviet spying and shit. I guarantee you try to match that face in the window to mine, it won't happen.”

“We have evidence, we believe,” Opitz said.

“And you know what that evidence is,” Grant said.

“We're just trying to figure out
how
it happened. One possibility is that it's involved somehow with your hypnosis thing. Maybe something went wrong and she did something that made you strike back at her, and it got carried away,” Opitz theorized.

“It didn't happen. No, I never hypnotized her,” Murphy said. “I never had sex with her, never hypnotized her. I have never been intimate with her.”

“Did you cut her hair?” Grant said.

“It's possible I did cut her hair.”

“If you cut her hair, you might have hypnotized her.”

“Well, that's possible,” Murphy conceded. “How can I say for certain? Other than pictures in the papers, I don't even know what this woman looked like. Who knows? I find myself fuckin' so many of them. I did them all, yeah.”

“Total chaos,” Grant said.

Opitz commented, “Let's talk about the artwork you made while you were in jail. Nude women. Legs spread. Demons and stuff all over the place. Looks like a scene you were imagining, something that happened, something you were recalling and drawing later.”

“No, the imagery just flows. I make the imagery access a lot of energy through different ways.”

“Your art hasn't been widely accepted,” Grant said.

“That is usually the case,” Murphy replied. “People don't know what to do with my art. They either loved it, or . . . they are scared of it.”

Grant said he was going to say something, and it required no response from the prisoner. It was just something for Murphy to file away for possible future consideration: “I believe the whole scene and everything at the art gallery was an art form.”

“I hear you. That's fine. But I'm disagreeing with what you're saying.”

“I'm anxious to test my theory, because I think you are probably one of the brighter, most articulate, artistic people I've ever met. You are complex. Definitely complex. I think that scene at the gallery featured your greatest fantasy. It was art comprised of somebody totally possessed by art. You know what I mean?”

Murphy said he did. The theory sounded good, plausible, geared for him to appreciate it—but it wasn't true. “My artwork flows from different places. Picasso helped me with one of my paintings.”

“As an artist you are not a mainstream sort of guy,” Grant observed.

Murphy said he met a chick at a flea market, a tall redhead named Sandy. She said she once worked on a painting so intensely that she went into the painting and finished it from the inside. Murphy said he believed her, and he found that kind of trance or transformation fascinating.

A few days after the interview with Murphy, Sarasota law enforcement announced their intentions of arresting Murphy and charging him with Joyce Wishart's murder.

Murphy was examined by four psychologists, one of whom worked for the state. Murphy said he didn't need to get up close and personal with other humans in order to kill them. He could kill people by staring at an ambulance or fire truck. He could heal people by touching them. He told the psychologists that he had been in touch with aliens and that he was the leader of a thousand-member cult.

 

 

Following up on the lead from Murphy regarding a tall redhead named Sandy, Detectives Glover and Grant went to the Midway Flea Market and searched for the woman with a booth who, according to Murphy, took his painted plates.

They found Sandy Rucinski, who remembered Murphy: “He was very strange. He asked me to coffee, but I declined.”

He'd given her a business card, with his phone number and e-mail address. Printed in one corner was
What's real?

 

 

During August 2004, Hurricane Charley ravaged sections of Florida. The detectives wanted to reinterview the folks out at Solomon's Castle, but they had to wait. Murphy's brother and sister-in-law were in the process of having the damage to their home repaired.

When the follow-up interviews were finally performed, Murphy's family had nothing new to say about him—although Alane did have an interesting question for the men: “Was there something ritualistic or satanic about the crime scene?”

 

 

On August 18, 2004, the affidavit of probable cause was filed. It argued that a DNA sample volunteered by Elton Brutus Murphy was a match for DNA found inside the victim's shoe at the crime scene. A second match had been made of Murphy's DNA and DNA found on a piece of human skin tissue found on the gallery carpet. And, though Murphy had not confessed to killing Joyce Wishart, he did admit being in Sarasota at the time of the murder. The affidavit noted that the FDLE forensic DNA analyst responsible for matching the samples was Suzanna Ulery.

 

 

The first thing a person noticed about circuit judge Andrew Owens was that he was tall. Six-foot-seven. And, back in the late 1960s, he averaged twenty-seven points per game as the star forward for the University of Florida basketball team.

Instead of taking a crack at pro basketball, he went to the University of Florida College of Law, and received his J.D. in 1972. His first job as a lawyer was with a law firm in Punta Gorda called Farr, Farr, Haymans, Mosely and Emerich.

From there, he worked for a short time with a law firm in Sarasota before being appointed to the bench in 1982 by Florida's then-governor Bob Graham. He filled a newly created judgeship in the Twelfth Circuit, which is a position he has held ever since.

He overcame some rough times during his first few years as a judge. He presided over felony criminal trials and was publicly criticized by defense attorneys because he participated with law enforcement in several undercover drug buys.

In June 1985, a manslaughter conviction in his courtroom was overturned by an appellate court. The case involved a woman who stabbed her boyfriend to death during a fight and was sentenced to five years in prison. The appellate court ruled that Judge Owens had read an incorrect definition of self-defense during jury instructions—and the woman's prison term was reduced to three years.

During his time on the bench, Judge Owens moved around from division to division in an attempt to avoid burnout, and had presided over civil, criminal, and juvenile trials. During that time he helped develop drug and mental-health programs that offered people treatment rather than jail time for minor crimes.

Presented with the evidence against Elton Brutus Murphy, Judge Owens signed the arrest warrant for murder.

 

 

While this was going on, Murphy picked at scabs in his one-man confinement cell. Two weeks after his interview with Detectives Grant and Opitz, Murphy decided to end his own life.

“I cut open my mattress with a razor blade. I peeled back the top of it so that my blood would drain into the stuffing of the mattress,” Murphy said.

Murphy cut his left thigh, creating a nine-inch gash. It was so deep that it went almost to the bone.

“I was hoping to cut my femoral artery, but I just missed it,” he said. He stopped cutting. He thought he might survive, but lose his leg. That frightened him into stopping. In order to stop the bleeding, he stuffed pages from a newspaper into the gash.

A couple of days later, Murphy was moved to Huntsville Unit in Texas. When he arrived, he was strip-searched.

The guard looked at Murphy's leg, saw the newspaper stuffed into the gash, and said, “What the hell did you do to your leg?”

Murphy was rushed to the prison doctor, who had to cut away half a pound of infected flesh before he could sew up the leg. Twenty-nine stitches were needed to close the wound.

“I still have a huge scar on my leg as a reminder,” Murphy said years later.

 

 

In September, police located Murphy's ex-girlfriend, Jane Wingate, who had remarried and now had a new surname. She remembered, just as he had, that Murphy tried to turn her into a swinger, but she declined.

She told police that he'd confessed to perverse acts as a young man, and that he loved his sharp barber tools. By the time they broke up, all he ever did was weld things together.

Before he lived with Jane Wingate and her seventeen-year-old daughter, he lived with his mother.

 

 

In October, Murphy was removed from Huntsville Unit and extradited to Sarasota, Florida, to face the music. This process sounds like something that should have taken a day. But the truth was he was in transit between the facilities for three days.

He was put on a bus, where he was handcuffed and shackled. The bus stopped at many jails and prisons, picking up prisoners and dropping prisoners off. They spent the night at various prisons and jails en route.

Murphy's new home was the Sarasota County Jail, where he was charged with the crime of murder and was put into a cell. He arrived in Sarasota in the middle of the night; the next morning he was again handcuffed and shackled and taken across the street to the interrogation room at the SPD. This room had a big mirror, and he assumed that he was being both observed and recorded.

Detective Grant was again asking the questions. This time Grant tried to come off like he was Murphy's buddy, and Murphy played along.

Grant said they were going to take Murphy for a ride. He wanted the prisoner to visit downtown Sarasota and point out the places where he'd been—such as the gallery where he was trying to sell his work, as well as the coffee place and bookstore on the corner. Murphy said he would be glad to do that if they'd just loosen one ankle cuff, which was bothering him. Murphy said, “My one ankle's swelled up a bit. That's why it needs to be loosened.
Ahh,
that feels better.”

Murphy got into an unmarked car with Grant and another officer. They drove him right past the Provenance Gallery so they could see his reaction.

“I just ignored it,” Murphy recalled. After the ride he was returned to his cell.

 

 

On October 30, 2004, public defender Adam Tebrugge wrote a letter to SPD chief Peter J. Abbott officially informing him that he had been appointed to represent Murphy.

Please consider this letter to require no further contact between my client and anyone employed at your office,
Tebrugge wrote.

Tebrugge came to visit Murphy. Murphy liked him. The public defender was lean and tall, with slightly graying hair. Murphy figured he and the lawyer were about the same age, maybe a difference of five years, tops.

“He told me at our first meeting that he didn't want me to think of him as just a guy from the public defender's office. He said, ‘Think of me as your private lawyer, and that you retained me for sixty thousand dollars. I will do just as good of a job and put forth just as much effort as if you had paid me all of that money.'”

Tebrugge immediately had Murphy sign an invocation of rights affidavit, instructing authorities that Murphy should no longer be questioned without his lawyer present.

Murphy would be represented well. Tebrugge, an attorney since 1985, was an anti–death penalty activist who frequently argued in public, often at Catholic Church gatherings, that life in prison was a superior, and more just, punishment—even for the worst of the worst. People thought that the death penalty saved taxpayers money because it was cheaper to kill a prisoner than to keep him incarcerated for life. But this was not the case. In fact, the opposite was true.

Tebrugge used the example of Joseph P. Smith, the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered eleven-year-old Carlie Brucia. If the state had not tried (and succeeded) to get the death penalty in that case, there would have been no trial. Smith would have pleaded guilty, been sentenced to life in prison, no chance for parole, and that would have been that. Because the legal process between sentencing and the carrying out of the death penalty was so time-consuming and complex, costs to the taxpayer exceeded those of keeping a man in prison. Tebrugge argued that the criminal justice system would be better served by allocating resources to help victims and their families through counseling and other support.

Murphy liked the guy.

 

 

“After I was there only a few weeks, they moved me into an adjustment cell,” Murphy said. The cell was also referred to as “confinement” or “the Box.” The official reason for the transfer was “administrative.” His new home was a tiny one-man enclosure furnished with a stainless-steel combination sink/ toilet and a steel bunk. That miniature room would be his for many months. That's a lot of scab picking.

“During that time I was alone with my mind twenty-four hours a day,” Murphy said. Not a nice place to be. In this fervid, claustrophobic ambiance, Murphy's delusions were malignant, growing and multiplying.

The only way he could tamp down the delusions was by reading a book. It helped to replace the narrative in his head with another. If an author was good, he could shout down the voices in Murphy's head.

Every waking hour during those long days and weeks was a descending trip through a “self-imposed spiritual nightmare.” Over those weeks he formulated a new makeshift philosophy, an attempt to answer unanswerable questions.

“I figured out the process necessary to make everything work,” Murphy said. The system involved replacing souls—removing the soul from a human being and replacing it with a completely different soul.

He had the power to pull the soul out and plug in the new. It wasn't just a quick switch. It was complicated. Sometimes it took hours, sometimes days. The new soul had to go through an intensive program of “disciplined indoctrination” in order to properly accomplish “transformation and renewal.”

He saw spirits and souls as physical entities. They were objects and existed in all living things. Since he was made out of time, he performed the soul renewal process with “everyone I could think of.”

The disciplined soul program resembled in some ways the ordeal a candidate must endure to become a Navy SEAL. Murphy perhaps understood the similarity, once referring to soul refurbishment as “virtual boot camp.”

The process did not always go as planned. With something that complex, there was always the possibility of something going awry. “Sometimes souls and spirits from different living entities would merge, to form a new solitary soul,” Murphy explained. “The renovated souls sometimes flew back into the body that they came from. Sometimes they switched bodies.”

Because of the complexity of the transferences, Murphy needed complete concentration—vivid and relentless visualization. And that was what kept him busy during his months in the Sarasota County Jail.

 

 

At least, that's Murphy's version. Jail records indicate Murphy was not being a good boy. At one point he was on the receiving end of a stun gun, held down by a couple of deputies and stunned repeatedly on the backs of his legs.

Hurt like hell, Murphy recalled. But, he claimed, he was not incapacitated. They also pepper-sprayed him. It wasn't gross police brutality. Murphy admitted that he deserved the treatment, for he had just attacked a deputy with a mop bucket wringer.

Murphy offered as an explanation that anyone would be cranky, given the circumstances. He had endured months with no window, no TV, no radio. He only left the cell for twenty minutes a day to walk down the hall to a shower. The leg wound still looked nasty.

As he was taking the stun gun, trying to show heart, he recalled the time, three years earlier, when he had owned and used a stun gun. He knew the one that got him on the legs was top quality, leaving a huge welt each time it struck, probably tons more powerful than his own. He felt he could testify to the weapon's ineffectiveness. Stun guns were useless. Now a Taser, on the other hand, was very effective. He'd seen them used in the jail a few times, and he was impressed. They would knock a grown man to the ground and, yes, incapacitate him.

 

 

On November 10, 2004, Detective Glover received word that an African-American inmate named James Franklin, doing a seven-month stretch in the Sarasota County Jail for selling cocaine, had something to say about Murphy. He claimed Murphy made several admissions to him regarding the murder of Joyce Wishart.