The Murder Room (9 page)

But he was hooked by the gory world of the morgue. He decided to spurn the more prestigious field of clinical psychology to become a prison psychologist. “There is high snobbery in the psychological world, and prisons are supposed to attract the dullest, the biggest drones, the most stupid,” he said. “That may or may not be true, but I’m going to do what I want, what is most fun for me, what satisfies my needs. Listening to neurotic housewives discuss their cats’ puberty won’t do it for me.”

In May 1978, he took a job in the frozen Upper Peninsula of Michigan as a psychologist at the old prison at Marquette, a Romanesque castle on Lake Superior with five-foot-thick stone walls. The castle housed all the most violent prisoners in Michigan in one place.

Winter had eight hours of daylight and fourteen feet of snow. For recreation, locals sat in a lakefront restaurant eating Cornish meat pies and watching the towering shards of lake ice break up as iron freighters came and went. Walter thought he had never seen such a gloomy, desolate place in his life.

The warden gave him his schedule. Each day he would see six appointments. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, sadists, and serial killers. Men whose crimes had landed them in prison, and whose crimes in other prisons—stabbing a guard, gouging out a fellow inmate’s eye with a spoon, leading a riot—had landed them in the toughest prison of all.

They’d mostly be psychopaths, far more cunning than Wall Street lawyers. They would try to charm, beguile, or frighten him. They would try to convince him they’d found Jesus; threaten to strangle him, cut out his heart and piss on it, eat his kidneys. They’d tried to shock him: The man who’d stapled his children’s eyelids open, then urinated into them. The repeat child molesters who preyed on hundreds. Plato said that there were only a few ways to do good, but countless ways to do evil. He would hear all of them.

He would take it all in with a cold stare. His job was to judge whether a man was irredeemable, filled with demons that were a danger to him or to others, or whether a man’s better angels could be called forth. He had to judge them correctly every time; lives were at stake. It was a daily contest of wills.

Some would be bright and impressive with good families and high IQs; others were tattoo-inked creatures who gave people the shivers just to look at them.

He’d tell them, “Let’s be clear. The reason you are in prison is your neighbors don’t want you to break into their house and rape the cat.”

His office was a small rectangle with concrete-block walls, an old wooden desk and old steel filing cabinet, a wooden chair for clients. There was a single picture on the wall—a flower. A window that looked out on the iron-ore port, one of the coldest, snowiest, and darkest places in the United States.

“Perfect,” he said.

“What a terrible job,” a friend said. “Did you say you moved from Los Angeles?”

“It’ll be grand,” he said.

It was the ideal laboratory to study evil.

T
he community room at the First Federal Bank building at Castor and Cottman streets in northeast Philadelphia was crowded with Philadelphia and New Jersey cops, all Jewish cops.

Federal agent William Fleisher, one of the foremost Jewish cops in the Philadelphia region, stood to introduce the evening’s presenters on cold-case murder investigation. It was the monthly meeting of the Shomrim, Hebrew for “guardians,” the national association of Jewish police officers. Jewish cops had to stick together: “Kike” was still a sinister noun in police departments. As president of Shomrim’s Philadelphia chapter, Fleisher fought discrimination against men or women who were passed over for promotions in the tribal culture of police departments only because they belonged to the tribe of Abraham.

Fleisher was the assistant special agent in charge of U.S. Customs in Philadelphia, one of the most powerful federal agents in the Mid-Atlantic, responsible for criminal and drug law enforcement at the ports, airports, coastlines, and inland borders of three states. He commanded an $8 million budget, a hundred personnel, and sixty-five special agents in the Philadelphia field office, plus satellite offices in Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg, Wilmington, Delaware, and field agents in New Jersey. He had the equivalent federal rank of a full-bird colonel.

By that evening in 1984, Fleisher was a legend in the annals of federal officers. After two years in the Army—where hard-nosed first sergeant John Baylin “turned me into a man; it was the best mistake I ever made”—he’d returned home to Philadelphia and earned a sociology degree from Temple University, hoping to impress his father, a Temple alum. His father didn’t seem impressed. After college he fulfilled a dream and was hired as a Philadelphia police officer, one of his hometown’s “finest.” His father still didn’t seem impressed.

After three years as a patrolman and corporal, he joined the FBI as a special agent and made a name for himself as a fearless mob investigator in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. He became a renowned polygraph examiner and interrogator. Fleisher talked to everyone—pimps, hookers, politicians, door-men—and could wheedle information from anybody. He was a chameleon: friendly uncle, ruthless inquisitor, stout best friend, wise rabbi, comic. Once he went undercover on a Caribbean cruise as a stand-up comedian—and sent the crew to jail with smuggling convictions.

He transferred to Customs as a special agent in Philadelphia because Customs agents had more freedom to choose where they wanted to live, and Fleisher and his wife, pregnant at the time with their first child, wanted to raise their family back home. After a three-year assignment in Washington, D.C., the promotion to the powerful job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Philadelphia was a triumphant return to his hometown. He lived across the river in a five-bedroom split-level in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and occasionally did Tuesday-night stand-up at the Holiday Inn. On the surface, life was good.

Yet as he accumulated substantial government power, Fleisher had greatly expanded to meet it. At fifty years old, the once-slim FBI agent had become a corpulent man behind a desk, all five feet and eight and a half inches, and 250 pounds splendidly wrapped in Italian suits under the penumbra of a great Old Testament beard. He carried himself flamboyantly with a gold Montblanc pen in the shirt pocket embroidered
WLF
, a pinkie ring (like the beloved Jewish men of his childhood), a gourmand’s appetite, and streetwise wit. Fleisher’s weight worried his doctor and his wife. But the big man’s regret was that his large stomach prevented him from carrying his Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special next to his groin, cowboy style, as he had as a brash young FBI agent, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago.

He was still holding on to the dreams of youth. The comic book and TV stories of detectives, modern knights-errant, that inspired him as a boy still animated him. He’d joke about it. “I never wanted to be a government bureaucrat. I always wanted to devote my life to the battle of good versus evil.” But he meant it.

His dreams deferred had left him with a deep and unknowable sadness that could erupt to the surface in the field, paralyzing him.

As a baby-faced rookie patrolman in 1968 in tough West Philadelphia—ridiculed on the streets as too small, too soft, too Jewish—he’d answered a radio call of a toddler fallen from a second-story window at Fifty-second and Market streets. He rode with the boy in the back of the patrol wagon to the ER, but the ER doctor was having trouble reviving the boy. Suddenly a cry burst from the baby’s lips, and the doctor smiled and said, “This little guy’s gonna be all right.” The child was fine but Fleisher started crying and couldn’t stop. His partner had to lead him out of the hospital, crying for joy, “But I thought he was going to die!”

Billy wept at the scene of a murdered child, just the same over the arrest of a mob hit man. He wept when the other white officers branded a black colleague a “nigger,” shouting at them that he was a good man. The baby-faced cop insisted he’d read the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and heard the Upanishads were no different—it was clear the battle for justice was in the heart; each soul was precious. “The great religions teach us,” he said through tears, “that the loss of one soul affects us all.”

Whispers started to follow him. Crier. Social worker.
Too soft.
“I may be a short, fat, Jewish detective,” he later roared at critics, “but I’m the toughest short, fat, Jewish detective you’ve ever seen.”

Now the roomful of Jewish cops buzzed as Fleisher stood. He was one of them. He had a mezuzah in his doorpost protecting his house from the evil of the world with the blinding light of the one God. They loved him. It didn’t matter that Fleisher had hugged the Saudi state police in Riyadh after teaching them the polygraph, saying in tears, “I have read the Koran, and there is nothing between us. We share the same God.” Or that he considered himself a Christian, too. His wife was Catholic, and they’d hung a portrait of Jesus near the mantelpiece next to an idyllic photograph of two swans on a lovely pond. When friends asked him about it, he said, “That’s Michelle’s. I call that ‘Two Swans Getting Ready to Fuck’ ”—whereupon Michelle would cry, “Bill!”

“As for Jesus, yo, what can I tell you?” he added. “He was the first good guy in history.”

That was Fleisher. A character. A mensch. Crazy enough to try to love the world. Other cops said he’d gained a hundred pounds to accommodate his heart, that immense heart filled with longing.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the members of Shomrim, “many of us know Hal Fillinger, the great Philadelphia medical examiner. But it’s a first chance for a lot of us to meet Frank Bender, the brilliant forensic artist who’s making headlines solving murder cases with the Philadelphia Police Department.

“Fillinger discovering Bender one day in the Philadelphia morgue,” he added, “is the forensic equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Hollywood at Schwab’s Drugstore.”

Fleisher had shaken hands with Bender for the first time only minutes earlier. He had been impressed by the artist’s buoyant energy. But now as Bender stood and began to narrate the slide show of his forensic work, he was stunned by the artist’s uncanny ability.

He showed the bust of Anna Duval, the first murder victim he helped identify. From the gallery of the dead, the face of Linda Keyes also looked out at the room. Her unidentified skeleton had been found on a hilltop in Slatington, Pennsylvania; Bender’s bust ran in the Allentown
Morning Call,
and a man who lived 250 miles away in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, recognized his daughter Linda, missing for two years. Another bust led to the solving of a murder on North Leithgow Street in Philadelphia—the street Bender grew up on, just a few blocks from his house.

 

The case that touched Bender most deeply was a young black woman whose skeleton was found in a wooded area near a high school football field in North Philadelphia after being raped and murdered and dumped a year earlier. The frilly Ship ’n’ Shore–brand blouse found near the bones inspired Bender to sculpt her looking up as if to an imagined future beyond the grim neighborhood. When “the Girl with Hope,” as he called her, was exhibited at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, a niece recognized Rosella Atkinson, who had disappeared, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter, and brought Rosella’s mother, who looked at the plaster face and wept.

VIGIL FOR DAUGHTER ENDS IN MUSEUM, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
headline read.

After Bender’s speech, Fleisher went up and congratulated him warmly. The two men made enthusiastic plans to meet for lunch. Bender was eager to develop his forensic career through the connections of one of the most powerful federal lawmen in the Mid-Atlantic states. Fleisher was openly awed by the artist with paranormal crime-fighting abilities. “It’s sacrilegious for a veteran investigator to think this way,” he said, “but what he does goes beyond science and rationalism. Frank is the ultimate secret weapon for law enforcement.”

That first lunch led to a weekly ritual. The federal agent from the suburbs and the libertine Center City artist formed an unbreakable bond: Both men used suffering at the hands of their fathers as fuel for a fiery passion for justice. Fleisher was outraged by victims who were raped or murdered by criminals and then by the system; Bender was furious at cops who gave up on cases he was still passionate about, like the young woman whose skeleton was found enclosing the tiny skeleton of her unborn child in an abandoned Bucks County whiskey distillery. He had done a bust and his own investigation and was convinced it was a murder and he could name the killer, but authorities lacked the political will to care. Over sandwiches and coffee, Fleisher and Bender asked themselves a simple question: People were suffering, the bad guys were winning, and somebody had to do something.

Why not them?