The Murder Room (15 page)

Bender and Gatliff had met through the “Bone Detective” Wilton Krogman, who had worked with Eliot Ness and mentored the leading figures in what was once called “Skeletal ID.” Many years after his work on the Boy in the Box case, Krogman had introduced Bender to the facial skin thickness charts that had been developed since the nineteenth century. He had inscribed his classic book,
The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine,
to Frank Bender, “A fellow seeker in the vineyard of the forensic sciences.”

The bone cobblers exchanged a friendly hug, then went off to sit in the coffee shop alone, de rigueur for their grisly exclusive club.

Bender described the Nauss case and turned his palms up. “Betty, I need help,” he said. “I don’t have enough information about the subject.” Gatliff was talking about the challenge of rebuilding a Florida murder victim’s skull, missing the entire maxilla, for goodness sakes, when a tall, gaunt man in a blue suit appeared at the table and exclaimed, through a wisp of menthol smoke, “Betty!”

“Richard!” Gatliff said warmly. She gestured to her fellow artist. “Frank Bender, let me introduce you to my good friend Richard Walter. Richard is a forensic psychologist and criminal profiler.”

Bender gawked at the thin man’s long, withered face. He had the formal manners of a Victorian gentleman, but his small blue eyes glittered with irony. He hadn’t seen such a strange man since he caught
The Fall of the House of Usher
on cable.

Walter’s cold eyes appraised the small, muscular artist with his tight black T-shirt and cocksure grin—a face like James Dean on laughing gas. The forensic psychologist pushed his large round black spectacles down on his nose and said sardonically, “Oh, my dear boy, I see we’re overdressed.”

Bender howled with laughter. A guy who put himself out there like that, he thought, had to be a genius to back it up. Bender’s laughter came from deep in his gut, a bold, infectious sound.

“Why don’t you join us? ” the artist said with his natural eagerness, as effusive as a twelve-year-old boy. “We’re talking about cases.”

Walter smirked and further lowered the black spectacles on his aquiline nose. “I hope your talent exceeds your couture,” he said.

Bender laughed again even louder, ringing notes of pure joy. Gatliff grinned. Heads turned in the coffee shop.

Walter flushed to the flinty edge of his chin. It was terrible, he thought, the unwanted attention that TV crime shows had drawn to classic forensic science. He wanted to talk to Betty, not this straggler, clearly not a member of the academy. “Typical R. Walter, I became covertly hostile and sarcastic,” he recalled. “But Frank stuck like glue. I couldn’t get rid of the guy, and he laughed at my jokes. How can you hate anybody who laughs at your jokes?”

“What are you working on, Rich?” Walter bristled as he sat down. No one called him Rich.

“A few of us have been asked to do a profile of Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders, using modern profiling techniques,” Walter said. He lit a cigarette, shook the match out with two fingers, and leaned back to take a smoke.

“We’ll be presenting at the Home Office in London,” he said, going on, raising an eyebrow with good humor. “I had never looked at the case before, but it’s really quite obvious who the Ripper was. They got it right in the beginning but didn’t know why.”

Bender ogled the thin man. He had never met anyone like him. Lowering his head in his earnest fashion, Bender described his struggles doing the Nauss bust for the U.S. Marshals.

“I don’t know enough about the killer to be sure,” he said.

“Tell me about the murder,” Walter said.

Nauss, Bender said, had rejected his middle-class childhood to become a leader of the violent Warlock motorcycle gang. He described Nauss’s murder of Landy in detail.

“The problem is I don’t know enough about him to depict how he looks. The photographs are a decade old, and I don’t know his personality or habits. Is he married or single? Still slim or spreading with middle age? How does he eat? Does he exercise?”

Walter raised his eyebrow, signaling his interest. “I can tell you a bit about him. I’ve seen hundreds of cases like this, many involving bikers. He’s tremendously macho, aggressive, with an exaggerated sense of importance. He’s very concerned about image. He dispatched the body brutally, like tossing away trash, and simply for reasons of power, not sex or fantasy or Satanism or any other such nonsense. He’s just tired of her and wants to move on.”

Bender’s eyes gleamed like go lights. “Rich, maybe you and I could work on this case together.”

Walter frowned at Bender and leaned back, eyeballing him as if from a safe distance. He took a draw on his Kool and let the silence develop.

Bender leaned forward into the vacuum, speaking faster and with great enthusiasm.

“Rich, why don’t you come talk to the marshals tonight? I can set it up.”

“I’m afraid not, dear boy. It’s well known I won’t have my libations at the hotel bar interrupted.”

Bender laughed again. Walter took a long draw on a cigarette and turned inward.
Bender is a very intense character, very intense, bright but off the wall,
he thought.
What the hell is he all about? Oh, well, I’ll never see him again.

At six the next morning, Walter shot out of a deep sleep in his hotel room. The telephone was ringing.

“Hi, Rich!” Bender sounded like he’d had five cups of coffee.

Oh, God,
Walter thought.
What have I gotten myself into now?
He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for a Kool.

“The marshals want to meet with you today!”

Walter went to breakfast at the Downhome Diner with Bender and Tom Rappone, head of the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force in Philadelphia, to discuss the Nauss case. Bender played a trick on the somber psychologist. “You’ve got to try scrapple, Rich. It’s a classic Pennsylvania delicacy. You’ll love it.”

“What is it?”

“Meat.” The artist grinned.

Walter looked down at the odiferous brown extrusion of last-chance pork parts, snarled, and pushed his plate a foot away as Bender exploded in schoolyard laughter. Walter quietly took in black coffee and a cigarette, turning a hard flat gaze on the boisterous clown who seemed to be forcing his way into his life. “I was not pleased.”

At four that afternoon, the thin man sat in a conference room at the marshals’ office at Sixth and Market streets with Bender. With them at the table were Rappone and two other deputies.

“Listen up,” Rappone said.

Walter looked down at a yellow pad filled with scribbled notes, and cleared his throat.

“I’ve conducted a brief crime assessment of the Nauss murder,” he said. “Nauss was a closet case in the motorcycle gang in that he was very high up, but he also wanted to be in the mob, a promotion as it were. He had a middle-class background, and he’s going to be a little brighter than your average semi-organized PA killer and he’s going to be clever. He’s going to clean himself up a little bit, be not as scruffy; he’ll have more options available to him.”

Walter looked down at his pad. “Frank Bender is right. He’ll be clean-cut and living in the suburbs. He’ll be married to a compliant woman who has no idea about his past, and present a wholesome image to the community.”

Bender beamed like the father of a newborn son. “I agree with Rich. I think Nauss will be clean-shaven, short-haired, and living in suburbia,” he said. “He’s come from a good family and I think he’ll go back to what he’s known.”

The marshals exchanged doubtful looks across the table. One deputy pointed out that their few leads were consistent with a biker lifestyle. The marshals had set up a cabin in the Poconos for several weeks following a tip that the biker was hiding out in the Pennsylvania mountains. They followed another tip to a Western state, and set up surveillance across from a motorcycle parts distributor, with no luck.

Dennis Matulewicz, one of the lead agents, frowned. “I don’t know about this. A biker is a biker is a biker.”

Walter cleared his throat. “Not only is Frank right that Nauss is hiding in the suburbs, I have some idea what suburbs.”

Rappone leaned forward, his voice nearly caught in his throat. “How do you know that?”

Walter that morning had called the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, with 5,600 inmates, the world’s largest penal institution. The massive 1934-era prison complex, known as “Jacktown,” was one of the most notorious and feared of American prisons. Riots in the 1950s and 1970s had killed a guard and injured dozens of guards and inmates. Walter had recently started working there as a prison psychologist, counseling and evaluating the most depraved criminals in the state.

He had spoken on the telephone that morning with an inmate who had been a member of Nauss’s Pennsylvania motorcycle gang.

A heavy silence came over the table.

“Those guys never talk,” a deputy said.

Walter nodded. “Quite true. It is a fact that a gang member, a criminal biker, is a very rigid, power-based personality. As such he is extremely loyal and pathological in how he counts on the group. He has rigid standards and principles.” Walter paused and raised his eyebrow for dramatic effect. “But one can use that rigidity against him.” The marshals fell silent, waiting.

“I made the point that Nauss had shot somebody,” Walter said. “OK, fine, a real man can shoot someone. But he had shot and killed them in front of their child. It’s not macho to kill people in front of their children. It’s not a good thing; he’d broken a rule. And I used that to break apart the biker’s loyalties. Nauss was not living up to biker standards, Nauss was a bad guy, he’d done bad things, he’d not lived by the code a man must live by. I undermined Nauss’s masculinity to get the guy to talk.”

Walter smiled coldly. “I will sometimes sleep with the devil to get what I want. As it happens, Nauss is living somewhere in Michigan.”

Walter picked up several photographs of Nauss. He noted that the biker always wore a shirt that was patterned on one side and not the other. “It’s part of the personality type. He’s a black and white guy; there are no grays. I’ll tell you that when you find him in Michigan, Nauss will be driving a black Cadillac.”

Rappone’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. “How do you know that?”

“Ah,” Walter said. “Fair enough. We know he liked Cadillacs in the past. Cadillacs are prestige cars and he is a power guy who wants prestige and is cleaning up. Particularly rigid types like dark cars. Given his killer instincts it’d be either white or black, and he’d go for black. It’s declarative, pureness and evil at the same time.”

The faces around the table fell open with something like awe.

Bender’s grin grew wider. The marshals planned to present his finished bust of Nauss to
America’s Most Wanted,
the Fox TV show. Bender could see that a man like Walter could be of great use in the future.

“It’s not wizardry,” Walter said later as they left the federal building. “It’s all a matter of probabilities. I’ve been around the block a few times.”

“Rich,” Bender said, “you can read criminals’ minds the way I read women.”

Walter’s face darkened around a scowl as Bender’s laugh rang down the gray canyon of Market Street.

In February 1988,
America’s Most Wanted
broadcast Bender’s bust of Nauss. The sculpted face of the biker appeared dark-haired and clean-cut. Dozens of calls came in to the show’s tip line with sightings of Nauss from the East to the Midwest, but none amounted to anything.

Assuming he was still alive, the escaped prisoner and convicted killer remained at large.

R
ichard Walter was sitting in his small, classical white house in Lansing, Michigan, sipping wine and listening to opera in the civilizing presence of his antiques. The scowling, life-size samurai warrior, sword raised to attack, was a particular favorite. He was recalling his chat that day with a serial killer when the telephone rang, and he frowned.

Walter had been promoted to the largest walled prison in the world, the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, from the desolate castle prison on Lake Superior. The high-tech prison gave him remarkable power over the inmates. He could turn off their hot showers by a remote switch, or put them on a diet of “Prison Loaf ”—all their meals blended and baked into a hard, tasteless brick. “You will learn to control yourself or I will control you,” he told them. Control gave him satisfaction, victory over chaos, and thus he found the voice on the telephone disconcerting. It blasted through the line, as loud and excited as a television car pitchman.

“Rich!”

He rolled his eyes. No one else called him that. Although Walter liked the forensic artist, he didn’t enjoy being “shaped” by anyone. Furthermore, he didn’t feel the need for human contact at that moment. He would dispatch of Bender quickly.

“Rich, a producer at
America’s Most Wanted
called me, and they want me to do a facial age progression of John List—the most wanted mass murderer in America.”

“That’s wonderful, Frank. I hope it works out for you.”

“He’s the bank vice president who killed his whole family in New Jersey. He’s been on the lam for eighteen years!”

“Yes.”

“He’s committed the most notorious crime in New Jersey since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1922.”

“It was 1932, Frank.”

“Right.”

Walter said nothing, creating a vacuum in the conversation. It was like a drawbridge pulling up.

Bender waded into the moat. “Rich, I thought maybe you’d want to help me. You could do the profile. I told
AMW
about you and they’re all for it.”

Walter said nothing. He looked around the room. His music, books, the classical lines of the library—for years these had been his constant companions. Home alone with a bottle of wine, he gazed fondly at his antiques and felt the powerful presence of the men and women who had lived with them; he imagined these spirits as friends and family. He was quite happy living alone. “In point of fact,” he said, “I care not a whit for the general run of humanity.”