Murder at Willow Slough (2 page)

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Mail

The next afternoon near quitting time, Casey Jordan hit Save on his front-page design and checked his e-mail. It was probably too early to expect anything, but he knew his chief correspondent would be pumped, exhilarated. That boy was addicted to his own adrenaline.

He keyed in his password, hit Enter; a sound effect in his computer said, “You’ve got mail!” like it was all happy. He double-clicked, his screen blinked, and Casey read the first draft of his cover story.

[P.

1] “I Know Who You Are”

[P.

3] Schmidgall Dead, Lawyer Says He Killed 21 Records Sought from Alleged Accomplice

By James R. Foster The Ohio Gay Times

CHICAGO, March 8—It was, his lawyer said, the only decent thing the man ever did. Even that was only because he no longer had anything to lose.

Roger Schmidgall, Death Row murderer, openly Gay, died of AIDS in prison Sunday night, knowing that terrible things would be said about him today, sorry that he wouldn’t be around for his last 15 seconds of fame.

His attorney Anna Moulter obliged him this morning, releasing the names of 21 teenaged boys and young men Schmidgall told her he murdered during a four-year rampage through the Midwest. See Sidebar [next file], “Victims: Not Statistics, but Men.”

Schmidgall’s targets were students, hustlers, petty thieves, normal guys—young men he could sweet-talk into his pickup, dangling booze, drugs, money, sex, whatever pushed their buttons.

Of those who got in, only one ever got out alive. And even he dropped charges in exchange for a measly $700 in hush money.

But the most shocking death of all is the one Schmidgall denied to the end, the murder that landed him on Death Row. He claimed someone else killed Chuckie Pont, a 15-year-old Chicago hustler and police informant. He claimed someone stabbed him in Schmidgall’s apartment while he was gone.

When he returned to find a dead body and blood everywhere, he had to get rid of the corpse. So he hacked Chuckie to bits, stuffing body parts in garbage bags, leaving them to rot in the dumpster outside his apart-ment—where a maintenance man saw something, smelled something.

Anna Moulter reluctantly believed her client. It’s why she stayed with him when she knew he was scum: there was someone else in that apartment the day the Pont boy was murdered.

Nagging Questions

Moulter, court-appointed—Schmidgall’s third attorney—looked at the evidence and decided it didn’t add up. She listened to the client she terms “disgusting” and “manipulative,” and tried to figure out what part of his story wasn’t contaminated by lies and deceit. Almost none of what he said was the whole truth.

But she became convinced someone even more dangerous and deceitful stabbed the Pont boy over and over for the fun of it, then left Schmidgall to dispose of the evidence or take the rap.

Schmidgall died before his lawyer could win a new trial. So Anna Moulter came to the Cook County Hall of Justice today to do the only thing she could, to close the book for the survivors and reclaim her own humanity: admit publicly what those families, friends and police officers had always known, without fully knowing; that Roger Schmidgall killed their loved ones. He didn’t admit it out of the goodness of his heart; she talked him into it—as revenge for being set up.

But she had her own purpose today, the same one that kept her going through three years of fruitless appeals in the Pont case. She wanted to send a message to the man she suspects is the real killer: “I know who you are.”

Suddenly

Other people think they know who he is, too: police, prosecutors, journalists who have followed Schmidgall’s bloody trail through Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin for fifteen years.

If Schmidgall told the truth, her suspect is allegedly Dr. Randolph Scott Crum, 59, a veterinarian in Eastwood, Indiana—Schmidgall’s former sugar daddy.

Schmidgall and his then-lover Tommy lived in Crum’s farmhouse, drove his car, ate his food. Schmidgall claimed he used his once-youthful attractions to pick up victims for the older man.

The plot seems straight out of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer. But Schmidgall was no Liz Taylor and Crum is no Montgomery Clift. The horror remains; the crime wasn’t sodomy, it was murder.

Schmidgall never said publicly that Crum killed the Pont boy; the lawyer didn’t mention Crum’s name today. But he paid for Schmidgall’s apartment where Chuckie was killed; he was present in the apartment that day; and he paid Schmidgall’s original lawyer, facts hidden or glossed over during the trial.

Years earlier, Crum even paid off the first, surviving victim, whom Schmidgall drugged, stabbed and let go when the victim begged for mercy.

If you were a sugar daddy and your boy tried to kill someone, would you pay hush money, rent apartments, buy lawyers? What power could he wield over you to make you pay?

Blackmail might work.

Acquitted

The one time Crum was put on trial—in the murder of Sammy Barlow of Crab Orchard, Indiana, which Schmidgall belatedly confessed to participating in years ago, claiming Crum “directed the scene” like a filmmaker—the veterinarian’s powerhouse defense team won an acquittal.

“Who do you believe?” Crum’s lawyers asked the jury. “A man like Roger Schmidgall, a known liar, a notorious person? Or a respected professional in the community, a doctor who takes care of sick animals?” The panel took less than an hour.

Billy Gregory’s mother, brother and sister-in-law were here to witness Moulter’s announcement. They know who Crum is, too. They looked him in the eye every day during the Barlow trial.

He never looked back.

Knowing, Not Knowing

Betty Gregory gasped when Moulter read her son’s name this morning. No part of her was surprised, but she was still shocked to have Schmidgall take responsibility for her son’s death, even in such a roundabout, selfish way.

“It will always eat at me,” she told reporters. “I’ll always have that pain. But now we can go on.

“Do you understand what it’s like to lose a child?” she cried, supported by her only surviving son. “To have your baby ripped from your arms, and not know for sure what happened?”

Closure; she needed it desperately. So did Ron Cznynowsky’s sister, and Fermin Rodriguez’s ex-lover, also present. They declined to talk to reporters.

Roger Schmidgall had no compassion in life. But once he was dead and couldn’t use his silence as a bargaining chip anymore, he had nothing to lose by allowing his lawyer to read the names.

Besides, he’d be famous again. The cops would look stupid again. Anyone who ever did him wrong would feel guilty again—he hoped.

So Anna Moulter read the names, all 21 of them, slowly and respectfully.

Four will always be anonymous. Schmidgall couldn’t remember who they were—maybe never bothered to ask. He forgot them like faceless, five-minute tricks.

Police officers were grim, sad, but didn’t feel stupid. Even if they put Schmidgall away for the wrong crime, they put him away.

“Half a loaf is better than none,” shrugged retired Chicago Police Detective Ben Schwartz, one of the first on the scene when Chuckie Pont’s body parts were pulled out of the garbage.

Ongoing Appeal

Though the case appears moot, Moulter says she intends to pursue Schmidgall’s appeal posthumously. It’s her way of keeping the pressure on her alleged suspect—her way of pursuing justice for the victims, of making sense of her client’s senseless acts.

She claims her investigation of Pont’s death revealed numerous pieces of evidence that were never brought up during the trial. They all point to another killer. So she sent her message: “I know who you are.”

She intends to take her evidence to prosecutors. But with Schmidgall’s deathbed confession, further police investigation of the murders is unlikely. Some of her alleged evidence suggests Chicago police misconduct; she’ll get no help from them. “Why did they allow a 15-year-old hustler to ply his trade on the streets? Because he was a useful informant. Why didn’t they protect him from Roger Schmidgall?”

The cases were effectively closed today by her decision to reveal the names. Who else has any stake in vindicating a 21-time killer? If there were a dripping knife she’d have found it by now. She hasn’t.

But she suspects who has it; “I know who you are.”

Compulsions

She has no illusions that the other killer, if he exists, will step forward. If anything, she expects him to try to foil investigators with even more vigor and intelligence than Schmidgall did—and he won 20 of 21 rounds.

If she can’t nail the suspect, she hopes to persuade him to leave evidence behind when he dies, to repeat Schmidgall’s tiny act of contrition. “Society has a right to those records,” she told The Ohio Gay Times. “Even after the alleged perpetrator is deceased, I want those records.”

The accomplice is a compulsive man, she says, a man who keeps computer documents, photos, videotapes of his crimes hidden away somewhere. She wants that evidence someday so Betty Gregory and her children can sleep at night.

Silent Witness

Beyond today’s spectacle, the sensational news story, Schmidgall’s last burst of fame, the attorney’s haunted search, the families’ tears, the alleged accomplice’s glee—beyond them all is a final question: how much did Schmidgall’s ex-lover Tommy know?

Was Schmidgall pure vanilla back in Eastwood, when they lived together at Crum’s farm?

What did the lover do when Schmidgall overpowered his first victim and stabbed him? What did the lover do when Crum paid that victim off?

What did Tommy do when Sammy Barlow was strung up and hacked to death at an abandoned farmhouse a few miles from home?

Did Tommy sever all ties and run away, try to forget it like a bad dream, start a new life? Did he keep his mouth shut, hoping against hope it wasn’t true? Or did he help his lover from a distance, a more silent accomplice, stealthier, more clever even than Schmidgall himself?

“I know who you are,” Anna Moulter said today. -30

“Sweet Jesus,” Casey shuddered.

Schmidgall the Stabber wasn’t originally an Ohio Gay Times story, no local connection—but police suspected his friend Tommy might be the Quincy County Strangler, whose murders were the biggest scoop of Jamie’s career. The Strangler violated Gay Ohio, Jamie’s territory, and no one did that without paying a price. What started out as four Indianapolis men dumped across the state line in rural Ohio mushroomed to twelve victims in nine jurisdictions, once Jamie went looking for them.

What would the Strangler think, as he stared at giant headlines, “I Know Who You Are”? Casey forwarded the file to his libel lawyer, proud as punch and scared as hell.

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Louie

Publisher Louie Mascaro was outraged. “What do you mean you

refuse?”

“What’s not to understand?” Jamie shrugged.

“A national Gay magazine wants to do a cover story on you and you won’t do it?”

“Reporters don’t make news, we report it.”

“But this is national.”

“Louie, don’t be naive. There’s no guarantee it will run on the cover, that it will be favorable or even about me. Those Clarion boys will slum their way in from L.A., spend as little time here as possible, write their 2500-word quota and print whatever they want. Out-of-town reporters will promise anything to get a story. Local reporters have to live with the consequences of our work, but those guys will have long since skipped town.”

“But what about the publicity? It’ll be good PR for us.”

“I appreciate that. But Louie, we can’t let the killer think I’m getting more publicity than he is.”

“But surely you want your reporting to go national.”

“They constantly rewrite my stuff without crediting us—which tells you everything you need to know about this so-called interview. It’s probably just a cheap shortcut to the Strangler story.”

“Maybe they heard how famous you’re getting to be.”

“Fame is the last thing California concedes to Flyover Land.”

“I’d think you’d like the professional recognition.”

“If you think The Clarion compares to being a Pulitzer finalist, your girdle’s too tight.”

He used Employee Ploy #1, invoking Louie’s former drag career; but Jamie’s series on the Quincy County Strangler was the first Pulitzer finalist from a Gay publication. “I can order you, you know. I can even talk to them myself. I’ll tell them all about your insubordinate behind.”

“Yak your head off, but check my contract. You can’t order me to say hello.”

“Then I’ll make Casey order you.”

“If he did I’d quit. He won’t do it, he agrees with me.”

“We’ll see about that.” Louie headed next door to Casey’s cubicle.

“Don’t even start, Louie,” Casey said, refusing to look up from his computer. “If he doesn’t want the interview, he’s not doing it.”

“But why? How could they not put him on the cover? With that face, their sales would jump through the roof. Think of how our readers would feel, Jordan. Jamie goes national. A reporter who looks like a Falcon exclusive.”

Jamie teased, “Except smarter and much better hung.”

“Puny-dicked and too smart to know what’s good for you,” Louie shot back. “My God, don’t they have any common sense at Harvard or Yale or wherever it was?”

“Columbia, Louie. Graduate school at Columbia, now I’m working in Columbus. Connect the dots.”

Casey said, “He’s just trying to get your goat, Jamie.”

“The only goat around here’s our employer. Baa-aa, a nanny goat at that.”

Louie couldn’t believe it. “The cover, Jamie. They’d have to say who you work for.”

“Louie, have you seen their covers in the last five years? They used to have newsmakers; now they have starlets. Their message is that queers can feel good about themselves because some fourth-string actress on a sitcom you never heard of reveals she’s got actual Gay friends. The Clarion is about show biz. I don’t do show biz.”

Casey said, “Forget it, Louie, there is nothing so effective in this business as no comment. Thank God more people don’t know that.”

“Please, Foster?” Louie said unctuously. When the oil pan started dripping, the boys knew the engine was about to conk out. “Think of the exposure.”

“If you want exposure, go wave at the Today show.”

Casey said, “Jamie got plenty of exposure last fall doing election analysis on Channel 9. There isn’t another Gay paper in the country that got an opportunity like that.”

Jamie added, “Plus I do the Andy Fredericks Show every time he asks.”

“Public radio,” Louie sniffed. “Nobody listens to it.”

“Andy’s #4 in afternoon drivetime, which is damn good. He’s got an affluent, intelligent audience of opinion leaders, exactly who we want to be exposed to.”

“Why does somebody in the media not want to be in the media? Tell me that, Foster.”

“I do news, Louie, I am not a featurette.”

“He makes The Times more valuable that way,” Casey said. “Be glad you have somebody who isn’t a whore. Well, except for moonlighting at the escort service…”

Jamie chuckled over the cubicle wall, “Fuck you.”

Casey called back, “Anytime.”

“What about Rick?” Louie pleaded. “Wouldn’t Rick be proud of his coverboy?”

It was a much better attack than Jamie expected.“Not when I tell him I’d feel ashamed. End of discussion, Louie. I don’t do celebrity profiles.”

“You heard it, Lou,”Casey declared.“How could he have gone undercover for the ‘Homeless & Gay’ story if his mug was grinning on some magazine?”

“You queers have no common sense,” Louie scolded, giving up, slinking past the newsroom up Writers’ Alley, trying not to notice Jamie’s and Casey’s awards on the wall. Three of them were for the ‘Homeless & Gay’ story.

He went into Bookkeeping and plopped in his sister-in-law’s guest chair. “Looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll never forgive them— much less understand them.”

“Maybe this will cheer you up,” Doreen said. She handed him a printout.

“What’s this?” He stared dully at the graphics.

“The bar chart is profit and loss from our founding to the present, marking Casey’s first issue, the day he changed the name, and the first issue after he hired Jamie. Notice the slope, Lou, up and up. The pie charts show profit as a percentage of sales. You can’t argue with those boys’ numbers.”

“All I ever wanted was a bar rag,” he muttered. “To advertise my drag shows and strippers, sell a few ads on the side. What’s so tough about that?”

But the customers had changed since the old days. They’d been through Stonewall and clones, Pride marches and AIDS, Generation X, Y and Z. Now they wouldn’t pick up the paper unless he gave them something to read. So he hired Casey, a journalism major, fresh out of Ohio State, good grades, Black too. Louie thought he was doing a good thing.

Then Casey changed the name from Gay Times to The Ohio Gay Times, hard news from a Gay point of view; the paper started to take off, and he stole Jamie from the mainstream daily. Circulation zoomed, and all of a sudden they were Murder Central.

Casey hired Jamie the day they met, told Louie after the fact, breaking Cardinal Rule #1: You Don’t Spend My Money. Doreen did it up in needlepoint, with a feather boa for a border, and hung it in the office— a reminder to Casey not to do it again, and a reminder to Louie that he got away with it.

At first Jamie seemed like an ideal choice, scary even. His face alone sold newspapers. He’d interview some smalltown activist, snap a few photos, and a week later there was a thousand dollars in new subscriptions from Coshocton, because Jamie Foster spent an hour there.

His bright blond hair was eye-catching, but what shocked humanity senseless was his face. When Louie first met him he cried, “My God, look at that!” It was embarrassing, a completely wrong thing for an employer to say, but he couldn’t help it. Casey nicknamed Jamie “STG,” short for Stop-Traffic Gorgeous.

James R. Foster could make trains derail. At 25, he had amazing presence; giant, intelligent green eyes, a patented swoop of thick shiny hair. Flawless, translucent skin. A little on the short side, which only set off his muscles; a college athlete with the chest and abs and arm-bulges to prove it. The tiniest waist led to an amazing bubble butt. He was built for action, made to slam a guy down for love.

Sharp dresser, too, the latest fashions, a perfect little package to cuddle with. No wonder Coschocton drooled; an aggressive reporter and butch to boot.

Louie wadded up the printout and threw it in the trash. “Good job, you made your point. But don’t ever show them that. Don’t even print it out again.”

He pushed up and crossed the hall to his own plush office. Livvie from Circulation dropped the new issue on his desk. The headline was big enough to be read in a dark Gay bar, if not from a dance floor half a block away. The sixty tabloid pages were meticulously researched, stirring, at times even eloquent; with a news staff of five, Casey set the tone and Jamie the content.

Page One had photos: the lawyer at the press conference, a file shot of Schmidgall in prison garb. Louie turned to Page 3, read his latest thousand-dollar opus. Plane tickets, hotel rooms, computers, the Internet; why don’t I get to see money like that?

When he finished, he glanced at the center spread and the back page, his house ads; tossed the paper onto a chair and wondered how they ever got into this.

At least Schmidgall was dead. Louie knew he’d never have any peace until the Quincy County Strangler was, too.

The clock on the wall read 5:00; all its numbers were fives. Louie turned out his lights, lumbered out for his other business and a big, tall drink.

He drove toward the Capitol and cocktails. Suppose he did give The Clarion an interview, tell them the real inside story? He picked up his cell phone and dialed, imagining the look on Foster’s face when he found out.

The interviewer said, “I hear he’s quite handsome.”

“In the bar business he could make a mint, be a porn star, tour the nation. But no, he’s a ‘journalist,’ he’s above all that. Employees got brains, they want to run things. They got ethics, you can’t get away with squat. Don’t try to change the world, try to make money off it. I’m paying the handsomest man I’ve ever seen, and I can’t exploit him for a single goddamn dime.”

“What makes him so handsome? Anyone can be blond and bland.”

“His intelligence, his eyes, the structure of his face. This ain’t some prettyboy. He’s distinctive, charismatic, mysterious even. He makes you stop and stare.”

“Is he sexy or just cute?”

“He constantly projects sex appeal, and then turns out to be monogamous! Have you ever heard of such a crime? The world needs all the tops it can get! But after his lover’s had eight amputations, Jamie’s right there with him, committed, when he could have any guy he wants. Faithfulness only adds to his mystique. Every man in town wants that little cocktease, women chase him down the street. He’s gorgeous and I can’t make money off him? What?”

“I heard he tools around in a Jaguar.”

“I wouldn’t call it tooling around, he’s restricted to 3000 miles a year for insurance reasons.”

“Still, he lives in the most expensive suburb, in a townhouse full of artworks.”

“He spent all of five figures on that condo. He’s decorated it very nicely, well within his means.”

“He wears designer clothes, too.”

“So do I. So do you.”

“Listen, I heard he’s being kept by a very big designer.”

Louie laughed. “In Columbus, Ohio? Then what’s he doing with a cripple like Rick Lawson?”

“There isn’t another Gay reporter in the world who drives a Jaguar. Where’d he get the money?”

“A man’s money is his own business,” Louie snapped. “If this is a hatchet job, I’m hanging up.”

“That’s not my intent, sir.” So they discussed Jamie’s approach to the news. By assuming that the justice of Gay rights was obvious, he applied journalistic principles in new ways. Like a World War II correspondent, he seldom interviewed Nazis, he found contrasts in his own community instead; and it all had to be on the record, verifiable by any reader. He reported on troop movements, battles, victories and losses, and how things were going on the home front. He profiled GIs and generals, criminals and profiteers. He scoured the Statehouse, the courthouse, city halls and police stations, criss-crossing the state for hard news.

Then there were the sick wards. He visited caregivers and fallen soldiers, reported the action those men and women had seen, the valor they’d shown.

Scoops came easily to him; queers were the civil rights flashpoint of the decade and the Straight dailies never looked for a Gay pulse; they learned to rely on him for that. He had great news judgment, so his stories often went mainstream, and suddenly the mayor withdrew her latest homophobic appointment. From first word to last, Jamie grabbed readers’ attention, he made them care.

The nuances were lost on Louie. “So why not run Foster’s famous photo with his stories? Seems like a no-brainer to me, but Jordan utterly refuses. Other papers do it all the time, with ugly people. I begged almost. But no, some crap about ‘that’s only for opinion pieces.’ Next thing I know they’re both wailing at me, like the readers even know the difference. Don’t overestimate the public. But Jordan won’t work without a contract that specifies all his little editorial prerogatives, and Foster is twenty times worse. College boys. What for? ‘Hire the smartest people you can find,’ what business school bullshit. It doesn’t apply in the gay community.

“Oh, sorry, ‘we have to capitalize Gay too.’ And Black and White because Ebony magazine does, and there is a theory and—spare me. Don’t they know there’s only one thing that matters to faggots? Dick! Nothing else. You want to make money, give ’em dick. Better yet, make ’em think you’re giving them dick. The old strip tease, right? I didn’t invent this stuff. Maybe Jamie did.”