The Murder Room (29 page)

The killer assaults her in the computer room, beating her face and head with his fists and possibly weapons, causing her mortal agony and terror. “She’s screaming, pleading, and he has to shut her up so he strangles her.” He drags her corpse to the bottom of the stairwell, now his dark, private lair. “This is very sexual,” the forensic psychologist said, giving voice to his earlier thoughts. “In Freudian terms, it’s the vagina and you’re going down into it. It’s a sensuality independent of the fuck. He doesn’t want the fuck, he wants the shoes. He’ll sniff them up at home. The stairwell is a foreplay kind of entrée; it helps set the sexual context later. He took what he wanted for that. He didn’t want her tingly parts. He continues to beat her out of the anger of rejection of his fantasy, but really he wants the shoes. Basically, he needs to neutralize her so he can harvest from her what he wants. He does it and leaves.”

Leaving with the shoes and socks, the killer is flooded with a powerful feeling of success. The power-reassurance killer, seeking reassurance of his power, had repaired the assault to his pride and dignity and won. “He already got what he wanted, the shoes, so he triumphs.”

Walter turned and looked at Sergeant Snyder. “That murder scene also indicates a bit of a power-assertive guy who likes to dominate and control. A guy who lifts weights, exhibits macho power and strength with guns, hobbies such as karate.”

Walter realized the fellowship of detectives was having an impact on him he hadn’t expected. He thought the federal agents who lacked murder investigation experience were “quite brilliant in the questions they ask to keep me on beam.” He told the
Los Angeles Times
reporter, “Our value isn’t that we’re a bunch of fucking geniuses. It’s that we can call on each other.” As usual, Walter’s remarks required editing for the newspaper. They weren’t “super-geniuses,” he said, but they worked as a team.

Snyder was pleased with the session. “The profile fits my guy to a T,” he said. His guy was Dickson.

Walter smiled. “Check Dickson’s Army records, go back and interview his girlfriends, ex-wives, see if there were any problems with shoes.”

F
leisher was sitting at his desk in the Customs House, watching sailboats dodge oil tankers on the river. It was a lovely May morning, women were out in spring finery, and the boiled brown water in the blue paper cup emblazoned with the Parthenon almost tasted like coffee. The mood in the office was light, as it was when the ASAC interspersed fighting the war on drugs with practicing his standup:

“Bill,” his secretary called, “we got another one who saw you on
48 Hours
. Says he’s been looking all over the city trying to find the guy who looks like Raymond Burr.”

Fleisher chuckled. “I’m not that fat yet. Maybe by autumn.”

The soft Texas accent on the phone belonged to Jim Dunn, CEO of a marketing company in Bucks County.

“Mr. Fleisher, my son Scott disappeared in Texas. He was murdered, and I’ve been investigating myself for a year, trying to help the police, getting nowhere. When I saw
48 Hours,
we were in New Mexico following a lead at the end of our rope and I said to my wife, the Vidocq Society is back home, in Philadelphia. I thought I’d see if it was at all possible for me to talk to these experts on homicide.”

Fleisher was impressed with Jim Dunn. He sounded like a gentleman, highly intelligent, and a brokenhearted father.

“I went to the City Tavern three times asking about the Vidocq Society and the bearded fellow who looked like Raymond Burr. Finally a bartender said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a boss in charge over at Customs.’ ”

Fleisher’s voice turned serious. “Jim, tell me what happened to your son.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Scott and I were very close; we talked on the phone every Sunday. I hadn’t heard from him one Sunday last May when a woman I’d never heard of called me at home very late and asked me if I was Scott Dunn’s father. She said she was Scott’s girlfriend, his live-in girlfriend, and she was worried because he was missing. Their bedroom had been emptied out—no mattress, none of Scott’s clothes, nothing.”

“That’s certainly suspicious.”

“There was blood all over the bedroom, Scott’s blood. I won’t give up until I find out what happened to my son. I was calling to see if the Vidocq Society might help me.”

“I understand. It’s a murder, obviously. What do the police think?”

“It’s the Lubbock PD, and it started out as a missing persons case, but now they’re investigating it as a murder. But they haven’t arrested anybody, and the district attorney said we don’t have a case because there’s no body, no weapon. In Texas you can’t have a murder without a body. I’ve been on the DA’s case for a year.”

“So the case is only a year old,” Fleisher mused aloud, “and there’s no body.” He paused to take a breath. This was never easy. “I’m sorry to say this, Mr. Dunn, but this doesn’t sound like a Vidocq Society case.” He sensed the vacuum of quiet disappointment on the line.

“Number one, this case is just too fresh for us. Cases have to be cold for at least two years. You just haven’t given the police enough time to do their job. If we come in they’ll be saying, ‘Whoaah, what are you doing on our case?’ We provide advice and counsel to police departments when they ask for it. We don’t steal anybody’s thunder. We don’t harpoon cases.”

“I understand,” Dunn said evenly.

“Number two, you don’t even have a body. Technically, it’s still a missing person case. We see those all the time. Some people just disappear, they want to drop out. He could come back. He could be a suicide. We just don’t know.”

“My son didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“OK, you’re probably right. But number three, even if it’s a murder it’s almost impossible to get a murder conviction without a body. It’s one of the classic standards of homicide investigation in our legal system. You need the corpus delicti. And it doesn’t help that you’ve pissed off the district attorney, ultimately the only man who can seek justice for your son.

“I’m sorry to say we can’t help.”

Dunn didn’t pause: “Mr. Fleisher, could I just meet with you? Maybe someone in the organization might have some ideas how we could proceed, just some advice. We live right here in the area and I will meet you anywhere.”

“OK, then, why don’t you send me some materials and I’ll look them over.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” Dunn said firmly. “I’m going back to Texas next week to keep looking for my son, and I want my materials with me—it’s all I have left of Scott.” There was a long silence, and then he said, “Mr. Fleisher, I believe you are the only chance I have.”

Something clicked in that moment for Fleisher. “I knew then that Jim Dunn was a good man. He’d do anything to find his son.” Fleisher knew all about the difficult bonds of fathers and sons, the longings that survived death.

His father had taught him to keep his mind and heart open, to always be willing to listen to a good man. He often thought about how his father had learned that lesson himself, when Temple University wouldn’t let him in to take his final exam required to graduate from dental school during the Great Depression. He’d passed all the graduate school classes, but he was too poor to make his last tuition payment or even pay for his diploma. As the exam was being given, he went to see the university president, Charles E. Beury. Beury’s secretary said the president was going to a meeting and couldn’t see him. Herbert Fleisher said, “Tell him it’s a matter of life and death.” The president invited him in. Beury, a tall Princeton grad, class of 1903, looked at his watch and said, “You have five minutes, son. What’s the problem?”

Fleisher’s father began, with tears in his eyes, telling the president about his financial problems and that they would not let him take his dental final.

A half hour later, Beury looked at his watch and said, “You have five minutes left.”

When the time was up, the president took out a piece of paper and wrote a note to the dean of the dental school to let Herbert Fleisher take the test. But when he got there the test was over. The dental dean instead made him take an oral final exam, which was very tough. “My father passed and became an excellent dentist.” Years later Beury was quoted in the newspaper saying, “A university should teach not only the rudiments of education, but it should set standards whereby young men and women may learn to recognize a good man when they see one.”

Jim Dunn was a good man.
I’m going to try to find a way to help him,
Fleisher thought.

Fleisher spoke rapidly with the no-nonsense tone he used when he wasn’t cracking jokes.

“OK, Jim. We get hundreds of requests, and most people we can’t help. But we’ll try to give you some advice and guidance. I’ll call Frank Friel, who is the police chief in Bensalem, near you in Bucks County, and we’ll both meet with you at his office.” Dunn said he would come with his wife, Barbara. The meeting was set for eight the next morning.

Dunn was speechless. “Mr. Fleisher, I don’t know what to say.” “Frank was a legendary police captain with the city of Philadelphia,” Fleisher continued. “He’s a Vidocq Society Member and one of the most astute men I know on homicide cases. I don’t know if we’ll be able to help beyond this. But if anyone can give you guidance, it’s Frank.”

T
he night flight from London landed in Philadelphia in the rain. The thin man in coach was not pleased. “It’s ugly, I’m exhausted, I’m miserable, it’s not good,” Walter mumbled. “And I’m out of my last goddamn cigarette.” He was disgusted by the sallow faces in the gloomy concourse, and got in the taxi thinking,
I’ve got to get away from stupid people.
The other passengers gave the gaunt, stiff-backed gentleman with the shining aluminum attaché a wide berth. This pleased him. “It reduces the time I must spend with the dull and ignorant.” The last thing he needed was someone to start asking him who killed JonBenet Ramsey, or who Jack the Ripper really was.

Walter was physically spent. On the road he lived on cigarettes, Chardonnay, cheeseburgers, and sedatives for long flights. Sleeping little, he often fell ill during trips, and depended on the kindness of strangers—pathologists in London to prescribe medicine, a boy in Istanbul to follow the frail American around with a chair, kindly folks everywhere to help him find his way. He was always getting lost. To restore his self, he told the cabbie, he needed to find the essentials: cigarettes, diet soda, laxatives, and a drink.

“The cigarettes must be Kool Menthol Kings. The diet soda must be red. The laxative must work.” Then he’d collapse in his hotel bed.

The trip to Scotland Yard had nearly done him in. He had been woozy with lack of sleep when he lectured to three hundred of the brightest minds in the Home Office on murder. Walter had consulted with London’s Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, for years on major cases. He would later help them catch the serial killer of homosexuals who terrorized London, explaining that the slayer threw his victims out high windows because this variety of killer was enchanted by nasty sarcastic puns, in this case “Fairies can’t fly!”

At Scotland Yard, “they consider me a guru—the guru of all perversity,” he said with humor and no small pride—meaning sadism, Munchausen syndrome, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and the other “isms” he seemed to grasp as if he’d created them. But the Brits were damned tired of hearing how smart the Americans were on the most difficult murder cases.

Looking out across the sea of faces, he saw the narrowed eyes of “the enemies of my ideas”—the Old Guard, old men trapped in the orthodox nineteenth-century procedural method of murder investigation. Walter was a heretic. The depth of the psychology of the murdering mind, its artistic, symbolic expressions in the positioning of the body just so, the hidden meaning of the knife in the chest (six inches long, the average penis length; look for a perp, like most sex criminals filling the prisons in seething rage, who couldn’t get it up). They were horrified by him. He was peddling “a cross between New Age folderol and witchcraft.” His challenge was to convince them his work was empirical, “not just bad gas from a good meal.”

He started by trying to amuse them with his “tale of woe.” After working a full day at the prison in Lansing, Michigan, he’d driven to Detroit, flown all night to London without sleeping a wink. He’d landed and “fumbled around like I do, getting lost in the airport and train system,” losing more time. He’d arrived at the Philadelphia office at 11:30 A.M., eager to rest for the speech the next day. “Oh, no,” they said. “The speech is today. It’s right now!” He was standing before them now nearly cataleptic with fatigue, and hoped for their forbearance.

It was true, but they were not amused. “They didn’t seem to care I hadn’t slept in thirty hours.” Instead, sensing his weakness, they attacked. Even one of his friends set him up, put him on the spot.

Now he had his Philadelphia cab driver stop at an all-night drugstore. Walter found the essentials and put them on the counter. The young clerk asked for ID to buy the cigarettes. He glared at her in disbelief.

“Madam, you’re carding me! I’m sixty goddamn years old! Look at this face!” Sweeping out the door, he muttered, “I’ll go somewhere where they require an IQ above seventy.”

Later in his Center City hotel room, overlooking Broad Street, he calmed down with a cigarette. His temper had come from addiction. “My exercise is inhaling,” he’d joke, or, “My exercise is coughing after smoking.” He was not proud of it, it was simply a fact. “During nicotine withdrawal, I become like a hawk eyeing a mouse. I simply cannot tolerate human frailty.”