The Murder Room (18 page)

“Rich, this is great.”

“Just so. You’re asking brilliant questions. In the information game, the most important part of the equation is the question, not the answer.”

That evening, Bender put the finishing touches on List. His age-progression bust had a broad, bald pate, deep wrinkles, sunken cheeks, and a stern, unforgiving mouth; the bust included the neck and shoulder line of a dark suit and white oxford collar. He found a pair of old tortoiseshell eyeglasses with a thick rim at an antiques store in the neighborhood, and put them on List.

They looked right.

 

On Sunday, May 21, 1989,
America’s Most Wanted
aired the story of fugitive mass murderer John Emil List. Host John Walsh introduced the segment as New Jersey’s most famous unsolved murder case. More than twenty million viewers tuned in.

That night in Denver, Colorado, Wanda Flannery thought the bust of John List looked like her former neighbor Bob Clark, who had moved to Virginia. Bob Clark, like John List, was an accountant from Michigan, had a scar behind his right ear from a mastoidectomy, had chronic money problems and trouble holding jobs. Wanda was worried about Delores, Bob’s wife, a shy, pretty woman fifteen years his junior. She was worried her friend’s life might be in danger. She called in a tip, one of more than three hundred that flooded into the show’s hotline from around the country.

Eleven days later, FBI agents followed Flannery’s tip to a ranch house in Midlothian, Virginia, outside Richmond. Delores Clark was vacuuming the living room carpet. Bob wasn’t home, she said. He was at work at the Richmond accounting firm of Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham & Woody. Delores looked at the photo of the bust of mass murderer John List, and reacted with disbelief. Trembling and weeping, she said, “This looks like it could be my husband. But it
can’t
be my husband. He’s the nicest man in the world.” He was a good husband and neighbor, she said, a member of the Lutheran Church. She went into shock.

Agents arrested Bob Clark at his accounting firm that afternoon. The tall Clark, wearing a bow tie and large glasses, was walking down an aisle with a Xerox, and didn’t resist being led out in handcuffs. He vociferously denied he was John List, but fingerprints confirmed a match. The eighteen-year search for the killer of Alma, Helen, Patty, John Jr., and Freddie List was over.

The next day, Bender and Walter’s brilliant work was national news.
The New York Times
hailed the dramatic arrest of “one of the nation’s most wanted fugitives” with a front-page story. On page one was also a photograph of the suspect John List and Bender’s eerily matching bust. The List case launched Bender as an internationally known figure in forensics.
AMW
host Walsh said Bender’s detective work was the most brilliant he’d encountered in his career.

Bender was ecstatic. He called Walter in Michigan to celebrate their triumph.

“Rich, your profile was right on!” As List’s story emerged in court and in the press, the mass murderer’s life read as if Walter had written it. List told of fleeing the crime for the distant haven of Colorado, where he took the name Bob Clark and found a job as a night clerk in a motel. In Denver, he slowly rebuilt his life, finding a job in accounting and marrying Delores, who never questioned his story that his first wife had died of cancer. He rejoined the Lutheran Church in Denver and taught Sunday school. Those who knew “Bob Clark” described him as a friendly, if taciturn, man who always wore a suit and tie, dark shoes and argyle socks, and thick-rimmed glasses. He had recently landed the job in Virginia, so he could be back on the East Coast. His home in Midlothian, Virginia, was 240 miles from his former home in Westfield, New Jersey.

Walter was cautiously pleased with all the attention. “It’s nice but it’s kind of scary,” he told the press. “The issue then becomes ‘How did you do it?’ It’s hard to explain the synergy. It’s both powerful and empowering, but with it come expectations for consistency, so the standard always gets higher.”

On April 12, 1990, about a year after Bender and Walter had helped bring him to justice, List was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder. Though there was no capital punishment in New Jersey at the time, he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms, ensuring he would never make parole. Superior Court judge William Wertheimer said the case reminded society it must defend its bedrock values. “The name of John Emil List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil,” he wrote. “He is without remorse and without honor. After eighteen years, five months, and twenty-two days, it is now time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John F. List to rise from the grave.” While Bender and Walter were both gratified, Walter said, “Unfortunately he was spared the death sentence he had issued to his family.”

It was a spring of justice and redemption, of joy and celebration for Bender and Walter. They were suddenly an artist-psychologist detective team with few peers, as well as fast friends, bonded brothers, drinking buddies who’d just as soon close down a bar together as open up a cold case. But there came too intimations of a false spring. They fought like brothers, too, and over time, the voice of Bender rose in sharp complaint that Walter was stealing credit for the List case, while Walter, in stunned defense, accused Bender of slandering him and going off the deep end.

Bender and Walter were arguably the most talented detective duo on the planet, it was said in forensic circles—if they could be content with outsmarting psychopaths, redeeming victims, defeating evil, and generally destroying the lives of criminals, rather than each other.

O
n President’s Day, 1990, the city was dark and icy and the sky spanned the rivers like an arch of gray stone, but the small yellow café was awash in light. Fleisher pushed through the glass door on the corner of Twenty-first and Sansom, rubbing his hands from the cold. The small tables were crowded and noisy, the warm air smelled of soups and coffee. It was a federal holiday, and Bender had invited him to meet his partner Richard Walter, the forensic psychologist. Walter was in town from Michigan to work with Bender on tracking escaped killer Robert Thomas Nauss.

Fleisher was eager to meet the famous Walter and be cheered by Bender’s energy.

The news in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
over breakfast had disturbed him. Even the small print told of absurd and tragic things happening in the city, with a frequency that numbed the soul. James Wayock, husband, father of four, was selling cable-TV hookups when he was shot and killed by Benjamin Frazier, forty-one, with a stolen .38, for fun. Frazier said he just wanted to kill someone. Linda Garcia, sixteen, was shot in the neck by strangers and killed coming out of a movie theater; her fatal mistake was shouting at the car that had swerved and almost hit her. A fireball of gasoline-soaked rags was thrown into the mausoleum of the Victorian industrialist family of the Champion Blower & Forge Company, and a 125-year-old corpse attacked with a hammer. Finding a black candle at the scene, police said the attack had “Satanic overtones.”

The big man saw Bender’s face, beaming like a second sun. Then he saw the tall, balding, sallow-faced gentleman sitting with him, a thin line of darkness in a formal blue suit.
Richard Walter.
He had the strange and instant impression that the two men belonged to the same firmament, like the sun and the moon. Yet he’d never seen two more mismatched human beings.

Bender had said, “You’ve got to meet my friend Richard Walter, the profiler. He has the coldest eye for evil you’ll ever see.”

The thin man was wan and withered as an English butler, but Fleisher was surprised as his handshake crushed like iron tongs. Walter’s booming tubercular laugh filled the coffee shop. Above his starched Oxford collar, his words flowed as arch and cultivated as Winston Churchill’s; beneath it the blue suit was polyester and stank of a thousand cigarettes.

Wearing his trademark black T-shirt and jeans, Bender sat between the two veteran forensic detectives grinning like a boy who’d happened upon a candy-truck accident or a stack of
Playboy
in his father’s closet.

He’d picked the Day by Day Café to introduce them. It was loud and bustling with news and gossip that morning—the 76ers were winning in Philadelphia and the Communists were losing everywhere—perfect cover to discuss murder and other gruesome subjects. If lunch was disappointing, he could still advance his seduction of his favorite waitress. It was a win-win.

“Richard is the best profiler I’ve ever worked with,” Bender said eagerly.

Walter winced. “Quite true. There are only five of us in the world who know what we’re doing. Frank doesn’t know any of the others, I’m afraid.”

Fleisher laughed heartily, enjoying himself more than he had in a while. He was especially intrigued to see the wan psychologist and manic artist together for the first time. He had been stunned like every other cop in America by the duo’s prophetic work on the John List case, and now he wasn’t disappointed. He considered Frank a genius, and, he later noted, “It didn’t take long to see that Richard had an unsurpassed knowledge of the criminal mind.” Walter was equally impressed with Fleisher. “The Customs chief was quite affable and extremely bright. He had a remarkable memory for every case he ever worked.”

Wendy came to the table. Bender began to sketch her face on a napkin, demonstrating a technique to her. “A cheeseburger,” Fleisher said. “No fries.” The waitress wrote down his order. Fleisher was grinning. “Atkins is going to save my life.”

Walter ordered a cup of coffee, black.

Bender ordered a teriyaki salad, coffee, and cherry pie.

“You have quite an appetite today,” Fleisher deadpanned.

Bender watched the brunette’s hourglass figure return to the kitchen. “Look at that,” he whispered. Fleisher chuckled.

Walter stared into the gray afternoon as if he’d rather have been watching iron oxidize than Bender’s libido on exhibit.

Before the food came, the three men fell into an easy camaraderie talking murder and mayhem, including the case that connected them. They’d all worked on the U.S. Marshals’ pursuit of the fugitive killers Hans Vorhauer and Robert Thomas Nauss. “It’s because of Bill sharing his investigation with the FBI that I got a breakthrough that helped lead to Vorhauer’s capture,” Bender said. “And Richard helped me with a profile of Nauss. I still think we’ll get him one of these days.”

Bender’s face reddened in sudden anger. “That’s how it
should
work. But when I went to Washington to see the FBI about the List case, they were practically hostile to me. They wouldn’t give me anything. I think they had a profile of List they wouldn’t share.”

Fleisher and Walter nodded in agreement. “I’ve seen victims victimized by the justice system for thirty years,” Fleisher said sadly. His brown eyes had a faraway look.

“But why is solving a murder so hard?” Bender went on. As an artist relatively new to forensics, he was frustrated by the rigid thinking of most policemen. “They never think out of the box!”

“Police are very procedural,” Walter said, frowning. “It’s the foundation of investigative procedure, to build a case on what’s there. But sometimes what’s not there is even more important.” He smiled wickedly. “For instance”—he chuckled—“if I were sitting here naked, what was missing would become very relevant, as old and ugly as I am!”

Walter well knew the virtues of sharing information. He told them of the infamous Case of the Underwear Killer. He had just finished speaking about murder personality subtypes at a forensic conference in Atlanta when Georgia police approached him for help on the baffling case. Three women’s slips had been found strewn across the bushes of a park. The slips were bloodied and appeared to have been slashed down the middle with a knife. The garments had the letter “J” sewn into them. But there was no body. No sign of a struggle. What did it all mean?

“The police looked at it and said, ‘What happened here?’ ” Walter said mockingly. “Well, what the fuck do you mean what happened here? Anyone with half a brain can see a murder happened here. But often one doesn’t have to have half a brain to be in law enforcement.” Cutting and slicing were evidence of picquerism, Walter told them, the pleasure of causing pain through puncturing or slashing. It was the grave sign of a sadistic serial killer on a learning curve, like Ted Bundy, who evolved into even worse behavior, such as murder for the pleasures of necrophilia or cannibalism.

Fleisher looked up from his cheeseburger. “Thanks for mentioning it.”

“Not at all. The point is that some weeks later I was at a forensic conference in St. Louis listening to Roy Hazelwood, the FBI agent, describe a murder. It was a mysterious case of women’s corpses in Ohio. The torsos had been slashed open, and the slips were missing.”

Walter arched his eyebrow. “As it happens, Roy and I have known each other since Christ wore tennis shoes. After the speech, I said, ‘Roy, I have a question for you—what does a “J” sewn in slashed women’s underwear mean to you?’ His mouth fell open. It was the first initial of one of the victims, says he.” The two profilers pieced together the case of a serial murderer, a long-distance trucker who was convicted of killing his victims in Ohio and scattering their slips in Georgia.

Wendy came and took plates away, pouring coffee with a free hand. Walter grinned. “So there’s a certain inherent value in sharing information. We can put two and two together, make connections that others don’t see.”

Bender’s voice rose in excitement. “Exactly! Bill and I have always said we ought to form a group of forensic experts who share information and cut through all the red tape and bullshit. We could work around law enforcement, and really get things done.”

Fleisher chuckled. “They already have people doing that, Frank. Their names are Batman and Robin. We can’t skirt around law enforcement like vigilantes. We need their cooperation and information.”