The Murder Room (45 page)

“You can’t show them photos of the killing and expect to weaken them into tender remorse,” Walter said. “These guys are euphoric half an hour to an hour after the killing! It’s a big relief, and that hardens into a certainty that ‘the bitch deserved it’! A guilt or shame-driven attack backfires. Lacking any such feeling he grows cooler and more powerful, more sure of his web of lies.”

Walter thought police were “always too hyped up about getting a confession. I’d rather establish fifteen different points of inconsistency in a perp’s story, fifteen lies, than one confession that can be overturned.” Yet with an AR killer, “the trick to a confession is to attack their weakness, get them off guard, then incite rage—reproduce the out-of-control anger that led them to commit murder in the first place.”

Gordon asked the cops to leave the room, then went to work. He walked swiftly to Keefe at the end of the table, grabbed a chair with one hand and plunked it down on the suspect’s right side, invading his space. Keefe turned to face Gordon. The large bald head leaned in, inches way. Gordon’s blue eyes looked fierce, and he talked fast.

“I just gave you the polygraph test, and you can tell them anything you want, but you and I both know you did it,” he said. He let that sink in a moment. “I just have one question. Did you kill her for drug money, or was it a lovers’ spat and she came at you with a knife and you defended yourself? The clock is running and you don’t have any more time.”

Keefe said, “Neither.”

Gordon’s eyes flared. “Listen, don’t insult my intelligence.”

“Neither.”

Gordon scowled. “OK, if you’re telling me it’s neither, I know you’re lying. Therefore I have to assume it’s the worst-case scenario: You killed her for the drug money. There’s no reason to talk to you anymore.”

Gordon propelled his bulk from the chair, stood up, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

As Gordon emerged, the chief sent Whitney and his partner back in. The young cops were itching to close the case they had worked so hard on. Meanwhile, Gordon conferred with Fleisher. It was time, the two Vidocqeans agreed, to use the technique Fleisher called “The Everything Must Go Sale.” Getting a confession was the ultimate sales job, Fleisher said.

“You’re convincing a guy that it’s better to confess and go to jail for twenty years than to say nothing and walk free,” he said. “It’s the all-time sale. You’re convincing him he needs the very last widget the company has made, when in fact there are seven million more gathering dust on the shelves. Time is everything. You gotta act now; the clock is ticking.”

He and Gordon discussed possible approaches. “We have DNA evidence,” Fleisher suggested, “and if you don’t tell us what really happened by midnight, we’re going to have to go with it. We’re going to have to nail you.”

Gordon looked at his watch. They had less than a half hour to go. Whitney and his partner were still in the interrogation room with Keefe, getting nowhere. Gordon grabbed the biggest guy in uniform he could find, a sergeant, and pulled him aside. “I want you to go into the room and say, ‘Mr. Gordon came out, he says you did it, we don’t want to talk to you anymore,’ and walk out.” The sergeant went in, made his announcement, and came out.

Less than a minute later, patrolman Whitney came out of the interrogation room, grinning widely. He’d gotten the confession. “Keefe confessed. It was a lovers’ spat. He says he was trying to defend himself.” The suits and uniforms congratulated him as cheers filled the hallway.

Gordon quietly pulled the young officer aside. “I want you to go back in and take his cigarettes from him, turn your chair so you’re parallel at the table, right across from him, and tell him, ‘Bullshit. There’s no way a woman gets stabbed twenty times, suffocated, and beaten; it’s not gonna work as self-defense.’ ”

Whitney returned to the room and three or four minutes later emerged with a report. “As soon as I turned the chair and sat across from him, his head went down, his body gave in, and he admitted he killed her for money to buy drugs.”

Gordon nodded. “Good work. Now I want you to go back in and take a statement, name, birth, graduated, such and such—start from the beginning and then everything he did that night. I want it written down he’s confessing of his own free will, no threats or promises of anything. Ask him, why did he confess? In court it’ll be attacked—why would a person voluntarily give a confession against his own interests? So we need him to write down what his interests are—why did he confess?”

Whitney went back in. Minutes passed, the door stayed shut. The group in the hall fidgeted nervously.

Half an hour later he came out waving a handwritten confession and cheers went up in the hallway, louder now. The DA and deputy DA, the chief, Sergeant Cloud and his officers, and Gordon, Fleisher, and Gaughan were shaking hands, slapping backs, high fives all around. The Vidocq men felt excited to be part of the team. Rivalries and criticisms melted away instantly with success; they were all human, it was a natural part of the process. The VSMs said the cops had done a great job.

The charge would be first-degree murder, the DA said with an air of triumph. The deputy DA grinned as she studied the written confession.

“Didn’t these cops do a great job?” she said.

Later that morning, the DA held a press conference to announce an arrest in the county’s longest-running cold case. Surrounded by beaming cops, Rubenstein praised the police chief and his officers and their “dogged” and “high-tech” work. “These things don’t happen by accident,” he said. “It takes good police work. You can’t imagine the man- and woman-hours put into this.” Headlines in all the regional papers sung their praises. Betty Brooks said she was shocked but “relieved” and applauded the wonderful police work.
The New York Times
saw the arrest as nationally significant because of the use of a daring new technology; as the
Philadelphia Inquirer
wrote, “What really cracked the case were the DNA tests the police had done.” Chief Conoline noted that coroner Halbert E. Fillinger Jr. was “a great pathologist” for having flawlessly saved the skin and hair samples that provided the DNA evidence. A week later, the Families of Unsolved Murders Victims, a local support group, honored Detective Sergeant Cloud, Officer Whitney, and Deputy District Attorney Lori Markle for their outstanding achievement. Rubenstein said he would seek the death penalty.

Nowhere was the Vidocq Society mentioned.

Sixteen months later, on June 5, 2000, Bucks County judge John J. Rufe sentenced Keefe to life in prison without parole for the murder of Terri Brooks. Keefe had pled guilty on the advice of his attorney, who said the evidence against him was so “overwhelming” the most they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty. Keefe refused to address Brooks’s parents directly, who said they were not surprised, and were satisfied with the outcome. In a related civil case, the Marriott Corporation, owners of Roy Rogers, paid Brooks’s sister, the administrator of her estate, $675,000 in a wrongful death settlement; $276,322 of the settlement went to the attorneys.

Nowhere were VSMs mentioned.

Fleisher admitted his disappointment in a
Vidocq Society Journal
column, headlined, WE KNOW WHAT WE DO . . . AND DID.

He praised the Falls Township Police Department, and especially Sergeant Cloud, now a Vidocq Society Member, for its “great work.” Yet, “It still hurts me that members who selflessly volunteer their time and expertise are not always publicly appreciated,” he wrote. “Whoever said, ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan,’ knew of what he was speaking.”

Fleisher said the case was a reminder to VSMs to “stop and remember what we are really about in the Vidocq Society and who is our ultimate client. The client was, is, and will always be the truth. And our client is an unforgiving one.”

He signed the column:

I
n the darkness before dawn in her Ohio home, Mary turned in the coils of a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was sweating. She got up and went into the kitchen, but the nightmare followed her. Even in waking hours now, she couldn’t escape it. She tried to calm herself, apply reason to the problem. She was in her fifties, a scientist, a Ph.D. chemist with a logical, orderly mind that had fueled an impressive executive career at one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies. “I was always good in the sciences,” she said. “You can trust science. It yields up its secrets, if one keeps looking. Science can play tricks, but it doesn’t lie.” But this problem didn’t respond to logic; it was at the farthest end of the spectrum from reason. She lived alone. It was terrifying. The horror had trailed her her whole life, but she’d managed to repress it. Now this demon of memory was demanding notice. The ghostly hollow eyes stared back, wherever she looked.

Before sunup, she picked up the phone and called her psychiatrist.

Early that morning of February 25, 2000, the psychiatrist called from his Cincinnati office to the Philadelphia Police Department and asked for homicide. He had a murder to report. Or rather, his patient, who had been wrestling with the memory in therapy for many years, had a murder to report, forty-three years after the fact. Her brother had been killed on February 25, 1957, by her mother. She had witnessed it, been an accomplice to it. She needed to unburden her soul.

The officer took the information. The report was filed with the hundreds of other leads that had come in, especially after the
America’s Most Wanted
episode.

Kelly and McGillen were struck by the dates, surely more than coincidence. Mary called in her confession on the anniversary of the murder of the Boy in the Box. It was exactly forty-three years after the boy was killed. The memory of her brother was haunting her, she said. She wanted to talk to the police. Sergeant Augustine, and VSMs Kelly and Joe McGillen called the psychiatrist to see if the woman would come to Philadelphia. No. Perhaps the cops could travel to Cincinnati. No. Suddenly, the woman panicked. She said she couldn’t talk about it. Not yet.

Kelly and McGillen kept in touch with the psychiatrist. They wrote on Vidocq Society stationery. They called. Not yet, the psychiatrist said. He refused to press his patient. She had to volunteer it, he said. She had to heal. It was a tremendous leap of faith to decide to go public. Suddenly the psychiatrist cut off all communication with the Vidocq Society; his patient was regressing. Kelly and McGillen were polite, understanding. Fleisher was stunned by their persistence, “classic shoe-leather stuff, great old-fashioned detective work.” But like the previous half century of efforts on the case, nothing had come of it.

Mary needed more time, years more time, to sort it out.

W
hen a weary Frank Bender picked up the phone in his studio and heard the voice of a young New York detective excited about an impossible murder case, he was tempted to say, “The wizard is not in. No miracles will be performed tonight.” But Keith Hall, the twenty-five-year-old detective from Manlius, a small town outside of Syracuse, said that after banging his head against the impenetrable cold case for two years he’d just had a revelation. He knew that nobody on earth could solve the murder but Frank Bender of Philadelphia.

“My wife and I knew it as soon as we saw your work on
America’s Most Wanted
the other night, a rerun of the John List case,” Hall said. “I told Kathy, ‘This guy’s a genius. I’m going to call him in Philadelphia. He’s our last hope.’

“Frank, we need you.”

Bender was intrigued. He liked to be told he was an irreplaceable genius as much as the next guy, and he heard in Hall’s voice “sincerity, a real good guy, a tremendous passion to solve the case.” When Hall explained that his small police department couldn’t pay Bender the $1,500 he now asked for his busts, not one cent, that about sealed it. Money was tight and Jan might not be pleased, but pro bono work appealed strongly to Bender’s conviction that money shouldn’t matter as much as art or justice.

“Tell me about the case, and we’ll see.”

The scant remains of a skeleton had been found in a shallow grave in woods that ran along a farm outside Manlius, Hall said. At first they thought it was a nineteenth-century farmer or Revolutionary soldier, but the corpse was dated as more recent, perhaps twenty years old. The skull had been smashed, and it was clearly a murder. They were the small bones of a female, possibly a victim of notorious serial killer Arthur Shawcross of Rochester who killed and mutilated eleven Rochester prostitutes from 1988 to 1990. The Genesee River Killer’s reign of terror sent frightened Rochester hookers fleeing the ninety miles to Syracuse.

That was about it.

If Bender could reconstruct the skull and police could learn its identity, they might be able to track down the killer, Hall said.

“Can you mail me the skull? ” Bender asked. Well, that was the problem, Hall said. He could mail a photograph, but there really wasn’t a skull. The skull, such as it was, was a U-shaped collection of bones framing the face. But there was no face—no eye, nose, mouth, or cheekbones. It was a donut skull—mostly hole.

“Send me what you have,” Bender said.

As soon as he saw the picture of the donut skull, Bender thought,
I can’t do this
. How could he rebuild the surface of a face without bones? Not wanting to give up easily, he consulted with a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., for another opinion, then another expert at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. All agreed: It’s impossible. Nobody can do it. Don’t even try. If you try, the implication was, it’ll be perceived as an act of stupidity or hubris; it’ll make a mockery of the profession of forensic reconstruction. “It’s impossible,” Bender told Hall. But the young detective wouldn’t hear of it. “Frank, I know you can do it.”