The Devil's Dozen (24 page)

A member of several elite clubs and a former staff sergeant in the National Guard, Anderson could trace his ancestry back to a cavalry officer in the Revolutionary War. Acquaintances viewed him, with his sport coats and bow ties, as urbane and charming, an exceptional raconteur. Even his estranged wife said he was a gentleman. Yet there were things about him that many acquaintances did not know.

Despite his affiliation with the conservative Republican Party, Anderson lived a secret gay life, and when he chose to visit the Townhouse, he may have been looking for company. He had only recently separated from his second wife, and his acquaintances had noticed his mood becoming profoundly sad; one person even called him a “lost soul.” They knew that while he was barely eating, he was nevertheless drinking a lot, and had squandered most of a recent inheritance. Some expected his body to give out, but he kept going, and in a city like New York, he could do as he pleased without anyone noticing. At five-foot-two and one hundred pounds, he was apparently no match for whomever he met that night.

Richard Rogers, who murdered and
dismembered at least five men—
and made the mistake of leaving
fingerprints behind.
Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office

Anderson was just one of several men who attracted an unusual killer, one whom it would take years to nail, in part because early investigators of the case lacked the right tools used in the right ways at the right time. Once it all came together, though, there was no room from reasonable doubt.

On May 5, a maintenance worker sorting through trash cans along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County for recyclables, spotted several tightly wrapped plastic bags. They gave off a foul odor, and when he examined their shape and bulk, he decided to call the police.

Each package, unwrapped, proved to contain different parts of a middle-aged man’s dismembered nude body. From the torso, it was clear that the victim had been stabbed numerous times in the abdomen, bound with a rope around the neck, and sexually mutilated. Oddly, it appeared that blood from the wounds had been washed off. Using the recovered head, a police artist was able to draw a portrait of the victim, and police taped posters of this image at booths and rest areas along the turnpike. Eventually people driving west from Philadelphia recognized him: the dead man was the missing Peter Anderson.

Yet while a number of people knew him, no one could offer information about whom he might have seen in New York, so it was difficult for detectives to run down leads. They learned that he had been at the Five Oaks Bar and the Waldorf-Astoria, where he had declined a room and was put, highly intoxicated, into a cab. Police also developed a suspect in the Philadelphia area who was about to start a psychiatric residency at a hospital. He had lied about his past record of mental illness and seemed a viable candidate on whom to pin this murder, but there was no solid evidence linking him. Police retained the bags that had held the body parts as potential evidence.

The ability to identify someone from fingerprints has been around since the late nineteenth century. The first successful case occurred in Argentina, where a killer’s fingerprint was left in blood at the crime scene, and the ridge patterns matched her fingertips. This was a visible print. There are also “plastic” prints, left as indentations in pliable surfaces, such as wet paint. Yet fingerprints also leave impressions, via grease or perspiration, which are invisible, or latent. Since unique patterns on the fingertips distinguish an individual from all others, it’s important to be able to lift and accurately preserve the impressions, visible or latent.

The typical procedure is to lightly brush a surface with fine powder, which sticks to the residual sweat and shows the pattern. Police can then photograph or lift the prints onto a transparent piece of adhesive tape and mount them onto a card. Smooth surfaces obviously provide the best results, but techniques have been developed for rougher or more porous surfaces. Amino acids in sweat react with ninhydrin and several other dyes, also producing an image of the pattern. In some cases, prints can be developed from human skin. In addition, latent prints exposed to cyanoacrylate fumes, or Super Glue, will turn up as whitish prints against darker backgrounds. These can then be dusted and photographed. Even before the Anderson murder, other methods were being developed or refined, including laser beams.

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a searchable computer database available via the FBI to every state, assists in associating fingerprints to known criminals. The program digitally encodes prints scanned into it as a mathematical algorithm, based on the characteristics of, and relationships among, their physical features. Using a standard classification system, the digital transmission of images from one AFIS system to another was perfected, and the process of making a match from a print to a suspect was consequently streamlined from weeks to hours, even minutes. A key hurdle, however, was that not all states were hooked up to this database, or all systems were not in sync with one another. Thus a print processed in Pennsylvania might not connect with a suspect in Oregon or Arkansas.

Investigators tried but failed to lift usable prints from the bags containing Anderson’s body parts. Even so, preserving the bags proved to be wise, because new technologies were developing fast and there was no telling what the future held. The 1990s, in fact, was the era of cold-case investigations, when determined detectives reexamined cases and either repeated previously used techniques more carefully or looked for a new approach. Anderson would not be forgotten.

The following year, two New Jersey state workers unloading trash at a Burlington County Department of Transportation maintenance yard spotted several heavy parcels wrapped in tan and white plastic bags. Since these bags did not resemble the typical garbage from the area, they wondered what was inside. One worker picked up a bag and thought it felt like a pumpkin, but it was July not October. In fact, some of the bags appeared to be bloody, the way butchered meat looks, so he peeked inside the one he was holding. He was startled to see a decomposed human head.

The police arrived to take over, and each parcel, unwrapped, contained the body part of a middle-aged male. A hunk of skin in one bag showed a bruise resembling a bite mark, and another bag contained the intestines, stomach, a plastic cup, and a latex glove. The dismembered upper and lower torso had been separated, and all the parts were present except the legs. One more bag included a pair of latex gloves, a bedsheet, a shower curtain, and a bloodstained compass saw. Packaging from latex gloves bore a tag from a CVS store on Staten Island. Near all of this was a briefcase with identification and a pair of shoes, a box of Acme plastic garbage bags, and a sewing needle. Two hours later, the legs were located in a trash can along the Garden State Parkway at the Stafford Forge rest area.

This victim was Thomas Mulcahy, fifty-seven, a business executive from Sudbury, Massachusetts. At first, he appeared to have been at low risk to encounter a killer. A sales executive for Bull H. N. Information Systems and an active church member, he’d been married for over three decades and had four children. He’d gone to New York on July 7 to make a sales presentation at the World Trade Center and had met a friend for drinks at the Townhouse Bar, known for its gay clientele. The next day, he had drinks at a bar near the World Trade Center and withdrew two hundred dollars from an ATM on Forty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue.

Family members who knew about Mulcahy’s secret life informed police that he was bisexual. He might have picked up someone he didn’t know at a bar. The autopsy revealed that he had suffered several stab wounds and a bite mark, and it appeared that his body parts had been washed clean of blood.

That same month, body parts that had turned up in a dump outside Schenectady, New Jersey, were traced to fifty-year-old Guillermo Mendez, a gay Cuban refugee. His arms, legs, and torso were found fifteen miles from his home, but he was not known to have been in New York or at any gay bars. His fingertips and genitals had been removed and most of the blood was drained from his body. Three weeks later, a couple of youths walking through a cemetery found his decomposing head in a bag. Despite the similarities, the New Jersey authorities believed that this crime was unrelated to the others. No more victims were found for almost year.

On May 10, 1993, Donald Giberson was driving on Crow Hill Road in Manchester, New Jersey, when he spotted a plastic bag on the side of the road. It was clear from rips in the plastic that animals had been at it, so he assumed it was a deer carcass. He rolled down his window to look. When he saw human fingers, he contacted the police.

By showing photographs of the victim to prostitutes, investigators soon identified the arms of forty-four-year-old Anthony Marrero, who was missing from New York. Five other bags scattered along the roadway contained more of his parts, wrapped first in shopping bags and then in larger plastic bags. The body had been cut into seven parts. Fingerprints confirmed the identification.

Unlike the other victims, Marrero was a crack addict and gay hustler, known around the Port Authority bus terminal at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. With a failed marriage behind him, he had moved to New York in 1985, but kept only sporadic contact with his family. He’d earned his money for the next decade from custodian jobs and then from pickup dates willing to pay. Last seen at a gay bar, he’d encountered it seemed, a bad trick. His body parts, too, appeared to have been cleaned up after dismemberment. Then another gay man went missing from New York.

Michael Sakara, fifty-six, was openly gay. At six-foot-four and 250 pounds, he made an impression. He worked the afternoon shift as a typesetter at the
New York Law Journal
and was considered to be both bright and intense. His longtime lover had recently moved out of the studio apartment they had shared on Manhattan’s West End Avenue, so he was often out in the evenings looking for company. He was easy to like.

For two decades, Sakara frequented the piano bar at the Five Oaks so often that the owners knew his favorite seat. He liked to talk and sing, and he greeted everyone freely with a firm handshake. He often remained at the bar until the early hours of the morning. Whoever he went off with on July 30, 1993, was also there, but no one could remember who it might have been. Someone did see Sakara enter a car.

At midmorning on July 31, a hotdog vendor in Haverstraw, New York, discovered Sakara’s head and arms wrapped in two garbage bags and tossed into a fifty-five-gallon can. On top of these bags, before the refreshment stand had opened, a bottle collector had come across clothing, traced to Sakara. Nine days later, on August 8, the legs and torso turned up in bags at a second location along the same road, ten miles north, in Stony Point, New York.

An autopsy showed that Sakara had been killed by blows to the head but was also stabbed five times. In addition, like the other men, it appeared that his body parts had been cleaned up before being wrapped. Also like the two men in New Jersey, he had been cut into exactly seven pieces.

Bartender Lisa Hall said she recalled seeing Sakara with a man whom he introduced, but she did not know a name. She remembered only that he was a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital. If authorities ever apprehended a suspect, they at least had a witness who could place him with the victim.

Several reporters wrote about a potential serial killer on the loose, a predator of middle-aged gay men. Investigators stated that they had no hard evidence for the assumption. Nevertheless, customers of gay bars in New York began taking extra precautions. In the West Village, the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project handed out flyers that offered a $10,000 reward for information. They wanted the killer caught.

Rockland County investigators on the Sakara case sent a teletype to other police agencies to inquire about similar murders. New Jersey state troopers responded, forming a task force with seven other New York and Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies, determined to stop this grisly killer. They based their headquarters in Rockland County, where the most recent victim had been dumped.

Found variously in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, the four key victims had been murdered, dismembered, and wrapped tightly in several layers of plastic bags. (Guillermo Mendez was left off the list.) From the method of cutting with both a saw and a knife, and the technique of wrapping and disposal, it seemed to be the work of a single perpetrator, soon dubbed the “Last Call Killer.” There were also similarities in the way the victims were bound and in ligature marks on the wrists. That August, Lieutenant Matthew Kuehn, a New Jersey state trooper in charge of the Mulcahy investigation, collected photos of male nurses working in hospitals in the area and showed them to bartender Lisa Hall. She picked out Richard Rogers as having the same hairstyle as the man she had met, but she thought the name used was something more common, like John. She could not make a positive ID from the photo. Since this potential lead failed to go anywhere, this case, too, went cold.