The Murder Room (41 page)

Marie was weak; Arthur walked her slowly outside. They climbed in the police van for a quiet ride home.

Five months later, Marie Noe was arrested and charged with the suffocation murders of eight of her ten children. Noe’s attorney denied the charges. Prosecutors said they would seek life imprisonment.

Her husband, Arthur, who was not charged, said he was standing by his wife.

“I’ve lived with this woman for fifty years,” he said. “She was my life. That woman was not capable of doing such a thing. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”

S
he was murdered three times. That was the salient point of the horrific killing of Terri Lee Brooks, Richard Walter thought with grim satisfaction. He took a reluctant nibble of a thick-crust apple pie, a sip of black coffee—a Colombian blend, too weak—and stared at the corpse of the dark-haired young woman whose slaying had confused police for so many years.

Floating above the white tablecloths in the walnut-paneled club, the corpse lay in a large pool of her own blood, arms out in the shape of a cross. Her body was severely battered with cuts and bruises. A seven-inch butcher knife was sticking out of her throat, pinning her neck to the floor of the kitchen of the Roy Rogers restaurant on U.S. 1 in Bucks County. The knife had cut her throat and severed her spinal cord. Her head was wrapped in a clear plastic garbage bag. Her face was visible inside the bag behind a small cloud of condensation that itself had revealed a story of horror to the medical examiner. Paralyzed from the neck down, unable to move or speak, Brooks had still been breathing, watching her killer close in.

On the far wall the safe stood open—and emptied of its $2,579 in cash. The killer ransacked the safe and leaped out the drive-in window into the foggy predawn of February 3, 1984. He was careless, leaving fifteen fingerprints on the walls and floor. But the prints were all ruined in the thick restaurant grease. Police had never made an arrest in the robbery-murder in fourteen years.

A yellowed newspaper clipping from the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
published six months after the murder, still told the whole story: UNSOLVED KILLING STYMIES POLICE AND ANGUISHES FAMILY.

 

More than eighty detectives crowded into the Downtown Club in May 1998, an overflow drawn by a chance to reexamine one of the most highly publicized unsolved murder cases of recent years. VSM Lynn Abraham, the powerful Philadelphia district attorney, was among those once again forced to find a stool at the bar. After fourteen years of dead ends, the police of small Falls Township, Pennsylvania (pop. 34,000), twenty-six miles north of Philadelphia, had asked for help. Sergeant Wynne Cloud said he was grateful for the audience with the Vidocq Society, but had cautioned Brooks’s long-suffering parents, Ed and Cindy Brooks, not to unrealistically get their hopes up. There wasn’t much more that could be done.

“We investigated the murder quite strenuously over a two-year period,” Sergeant Cloud of Falls Township told the gathering from the podium. The police had logged more than two hundred interviews, interrogated twelve suspects, and catalogued ninety pieces of evidence. “But after all that, we came up with absolutely nothing.”

The restaurant safe was ransacked after the brutal murder, prompting the police to investigate the crime as a “robbery gone wrong” rather than a deliberate murder. They had never changed their focus.

Walter rolled his eyes. He had sipped enough coffee and heard quite enough from the police. But he kept his own counsel as he appraised the ferocious killing.
It’s not a goddamn robbery,
he thought.
Any fool can see that. It was murder in triplicate. That was the point of the killing. But why? Who wanted to kill Terri Lee Brooks again and again and again?

The robbery theory gained traction with the police because as far as they knew, the young woman had no enemies, or at least none with enough animus to kill her. A native of Bucks County, she had graduated from the University of Maryland planning to seek a career in human resources, but after waitressing during summers in college, she followed her heart home and into the restaurant business. Brooks had recently been promoted to assistant manager of the Bucks County restaurant, confirming her initial excitement at joining the restaurant chain that was owned by the Marriott Corporation, with plenty of opportunity to grow.

Brooks was alone in the restaurant long after closing on February 3, 1984, sitting in her back office, doing paperwork. She had just locked the outer glass door after letting out the two “closers”—teenagers who helped clean and prepare the restaurant for the next day; the inner glass door locked automatically behind her, offering double protection. It was after midnight, an unseasonably warm and foggy winter night.

The roar of traffic on U.S. 1 had quieted. The empty glass-walled restaurant glowed in the night, a cube of light in the misty darkness. Brooks often stayed late, focused on leaving the restaurant in perfect shape for day manager Joe Hampton.

Sometime after midnight, she heard knocking.

At about 6:15 in the morning, still dark in late winter, Hampton arrived to open up the restaurant. He was surprised to find the outer door unlocked. The inner door was locked as usual, and he turned the key and entered. Near the door was a pair of moccasin-style shoes he recognized as Terri Brooks’s. Next to the shoes were her keys. He walked into the kitchen. Large swaths of blood were smeared on the floors and walls, mixed grotesquely with the kitchen grease. Terri was behind the counter lying on her back, brutally murdered. Police were admittedly stunned by the violence of the killing; indeed, Walter thought, they failed to understand it.

Vidocq Society Member Hal Fillinger, the noted medical examiner, had performed the autopsy in 1984, and recalled every gruesome detail. It appeared from the pattern of wounds that Brooks had been trying to leave, with her winter coat on, when a violent assault sent her purse, keys, and cigarettes flying. The killer repeatedly banged her head on the stone tile floor with tremendous force, immobilizing her. Then, sitting on top of her, he began to strangle her. He fractured her hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone atop the Adam’s apple that helps produce swallowing and speech and is often crushed during strangulation. But that didn’t kill Terri Brooks. She struggled violently for her life, which prompted the killer to reach for the butcher knife. The cuts and slices on her hands indicated she had thrown her hands up in vain to stop the knife. It cut her throat and severed half of her spinal cord. A second knife thrust severed the spinal cord completely and with such force the knife blade stuck in the tile floor, pinning her throat to the ground.

Paralyzed but still alive, she must have heard the killer foraging in the restaurant supply area. He returned with the clear plastic trash bag, and wrapped it completely around her neck and head. It was Fillinger who noted the condensation inside the bag, indicating Brooks was still breathing and looking up at her attacker as he asphyxiated her.

As the corpse hovered above them in the gray light of afternoon, tall, broad-shouldered ex–major-crime homicide detective Ed Gaughan’s lantern jaw flushed in contrast to his sandy hair, the only sign he gave that he wanted to take someone out. Gaughan was friends with Sergeant Cloud, who had shared his frustration with the Brooks case while the two were watching their sons play football for Pennsbury High School. Gaughan convinced Sergeant Cloud to bring the case before the Vidocq Society.

The Falls Township Police Department threw all its resources at the crime, Cloud said. The killing made headlines in the local newspapers, and the Marriott Corporation put up a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. It quickly became evident to police that it was a “robbery gone wrong”—terribly wrong. Brooks had interrupted the robbery in progress and tried to stop it, triggering her death.

Looking for the robber who, facing resistance, had become a murderer, police interviewed fifty past and present restaurant employees. They zeroed in on an employee whom Brooks had discovered stealing from the cash drawer, and another employee at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Philadelphia who had threatened her. Both were cleared. They talked to an old boyfriend in California, and ruled him out.

They tried to link Brooks’s killing to a spate of similarly violent fast-food robberies in the region and beyond. In April 1985 at a Philadelphia Roy Rogers only twenty miles away, fourteen months later, the day manager opened up to find the night manager stabbed to death, the safe empty. They contacted police in Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, where similar crimes had occurred, and interrogated suspects in all similar robberies they could find. On the tenth anniversary of the crime, a local television station crime watch program featured the case. The police received “lots of calls and our investigators ended up all over the place,” to no avail.

Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, Sergeant Cloud concluded his presentation. “We appreciate your ears,” he said. “We also appreciate your brains.” The room seemed to exhale, gathering itself for the inquiry. The first suggestions from Vidocq members focused on DNA testing, a technology unknown in 1984. Could the killer’s DNA be harvested from the victim’s body and articles found at the scene, including the knife and hair follicles in her hand? Cloud would look into it.

Fleisher, Bender, Walter, Gaughan, and Fred Bornhofen whispered among themselves and called out their opinions almost as one. The consensus was the police department had botched the focus of the case from the beginning, fourteen years earlier.

“Initially the investigators seemed to have gone after robbers,” Gaughan said. “Any time somebody was locked up who had committed a robbery like that, they were there interrogating the guy. They basically didn’t focus the investigation properly. A robber wants money, to get in and get out; he’ll kill if he has to but this was a more complex type of murder.”

Bornhofen wrote later, “It’s overkill and not the type of murder done by a robber. Even a rank amateur like me could see the case for what it was.”

Gaughan, looking sympathetically at his friend Sergeant Cloud, said the police had to start over. They had to interview everyone again, as if Terri Brooks had just been killed. This time, the Vidocq Society would be there to help.

Walter stood. “My colleagues are quite right. Robbers don’t swath the head of a victim in plastic. As it happens, this is the peculiar signature of a very complicated and dark personality subtype. It’s not a robbery at all. It’s a murder. The murderer staged the robbery to throw the police off. He succeeded, until now. We know quite a lot about the killer already.”

Walter paused. “In the information game, answers are meaningless. You have to ask the right questions, and the question is: Who cared enough to kill her three times?”

His rakish smile pierced the gloom.

“For whom did Terri Brooks unlock the door?”

T
he sweet hymn to Jesus awakened Walter abruptly. He was snoozing in the parlor of his Greek Revival mansion when the glorious notes of “Lift High the Cross” floated in on the spring air. He put on his glasses and stood on the porch glaring at the offending Gothic tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, diagonally across the street. It was time to teach the Episcopalians a lesson.

Wearing jeans and a red sport shirt, he pulled the Briggs & Stratton mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and mowed the front lawn—as he did every Sunday when the choir reached full song, whether the grass needed it or not. He was “quite pleased” as the rattling old mower drowned out the choir, and the clatter crossed the street to the opened stained-glass windows of the stone church. “The Episcopalians are perfectly loathsome neighbors,” he later wrote to a friend. “When they get going on Sunday I must answer back with as loud a noise as I can muster.”

“Have you finished being psychopathic yet?” Stoud grinned as he stepped on the porch, where the thin man was sitting, his face a sheen of sweat, sipping an iced tea in the sudden quiet of a late spring morning.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it, that people want to sing in church on Sunday morning?”

“Indeed.” Walter laughed. “As you know, I don’t make a very good victim. And I’m not feeling terribly charitable toward Christians at the moment.”

Walter had just returned from Lubbock, Texas, where he’d watched Tim Smith, a devout Evangelical Christian, be tried for the murder of Scott Dunn as Leisha Hamilton’s accomplice, a year after Hamilton was convicted of Dunn’s murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Smith’s attorney had portrayed the cold-blooded killer as a clean-cut, young, Christian family man, with a wife and three-year-old son, who had never done wrong until he met the conniving Hamilton. Members of Smith’s church had mobbed the courthouse, calling for Christians all over the city to pray for him to be found innocent. “The nincompoops filled the courthouse wailing that the killer was an exemplary fellow in church,” Walter said. “It had an effect on the trial. It wasn’t good.”

Smith, thirty-five years old, slim and blond, was a poetic, submissive young man who had been easily seduced by Hamilton, who “used men like you use a handkerchief,” prosecutors said. He trailed Hamilton around like a lovesick sophomore, following her to the Copper Kettle just to look at her work as a waitress, and deluging her with love letters filled with jealousy of Scott. Smith believed if Scott Dunn “was out of the way everything would be bliss and happiness” with the woman he loved, according to the state.

Smith had been deeply involved in the murder for some forty-eight hours, prosecutors said. He cut away sections of blood-soaked carpet from the bedroom to hide evidence, helped wrap Scott’s body in rolled-up carpet with duct tape, helped dispose of the body and clean up the crime scene. Fibers from the bloody carpet were found on a roll of duct tape in Smith’s apartment.