The Murder Room (28 page)

There was no rational reason Deborah Wilson had to die. The police would make no progress until they broke out of investigative routine and accepted the fact that the crime was beyond normal human comprehension and traditional standards of morality—or amorality, in fact.

This was no ordinary murder. It was a gruesome act of depravity. It was a New Age crime, a “Me Generation” murder. It wasn’t one of those pre-1960s killings that cops now saw in a bizarre haze of near-nostalgia: A jealous man shoots his two-timing wife, a law partner gets snuffed for half the firm. Those old-time killers were almost understandable to average folks. The cops always knew where to look: the husband, the law partner, someone the dead man knew well.

But this kind of murder, a lovely, wholesome young woman killed for no reason at all—this was crazy time, cops figured. But it wasn’t crazy; it was sane, methodical, cold, well-planned. Just another middle-class American exploiting the bounty of unprecedented affluence and freedom, steady employment, his own house and car, ample leisure time, a king’s library of depraved instructional media images, a large supply of young, tolerant, fun-seeking acquaintances—all the resources, in other words, that only aristocrats like the Marquis de Sade once possessed to sample and deeply explore their hungers. Just an everyday late-twentieth-century American monster.

De Tocqueville warned of the dumbing-down of America, but he never imagined this. The elite forms of evil had gone mass-market.

Still looking up at the screen, Walter thought to himself,
Young man, I know what you’re up to. One ought not to do such things. You can’t hide from me.

As Snyder began to describe the case, Walter sensed an air of excitement in the eighteenth-century hall. He detected a new seriousness, an intense focus from his peers. Fleisher had said the eyes of the world were on them now. Adding to the anticipation, another prominent journalist guest, Lewis Beale, a writer on assignment for the
Los Angeles Times,
was sitting at Fleisher’s table, scribbling notes. Beale specialized in cop stories. He had interviewed the L.A. cops who advised
Hill Street Blues
director Barry Levinson about his TV series
Homicide
and Sidney Lumet, director of
Serpico
. When he described the Vidocq Society, it sounded like a ’50s film noir band of forensic brothers “who pool their experience and intellect attempting to solve the unsolvable.”

Fleisher, Walter, and Bender were astonished. The Vidocq Society had become the media flavor of the moment. A noted film agent who sold the classic mob pic
Goodfellas
wanted to represent them. A month earlier, the Sunday
Philadelphia Inquirer
had touted the colorful club as avengers of “unsolvable crimes.” A week after that, the Sunday
Miami Herald
published the same story under the headline, THIS CLUB’S WHODUNITS ARE REAL. Suddenly there was pressure to solve crimes, not just discuss them. The Sunday
New York Times,
the previous spring, had captured the society’s fanciful Sherlock Holmes style with its dispatch, FIRST THEY DINE, THEN TALK TURNS TO MURDER.

While opportunities were nice, Walter kept them focused on reality. “Point A: We didn’t start this for recognition. Point B: We haven’t done anything to deserve recognition. Point C: Journalists are romanticizing us, turning us into heroes, to sell newspapers. Point D: They wouldn’t be able to do this unless there was a real need. It doesn’t matter how they portray us. The fact of the matter is crime is out of control in our society. People need our help.”

The publicity had brought requests flooding into the Vidocq Society’s P.O. box in Philadelphia—in letters, packages, court files, pleas for help, songs of woe. A Los Angeles man wanted the society to investigate his father’s murder, which had occured thirty years earlier. A United States congressman needed confidential assistance to solve a friend’s murder.

The desire to help was animating the whole society. Friel’s return from Texas and the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children had lit a fire. Fleisher boasted in the
Times
that the society was a “college of detectives” without equal in the world. Now they had a chance to prove it.

Friel backed his Texas conversion with more than words. It was Friel who persuaded Sergeant Snyder to present Wilson’s murder before the group for a “fresh set of eyes.” Friel had worked with Snyder in the homicide division in 1984, when Deborah Wilson was killed, and although he didn’t work the case, he and Snyder talked about it often over the years; the college student’s murder still bothered him.

Friel knew what Snyder was feeling, especially toward the end of his career when he was running out of chances. “Bob Snyder is truly a legend in homicide, the consummate homicide detective,” Friel said. “But there are cases you can’t let go of.”

Walter was impressed as he appraised Snyder at the podium. It was an important step that one of the city’s finest detectives had asked for their help. When mobster Frankie Flowers was killed in the Mafia wars, Snyder was the shoe leather the department sent out to find the killer.

Walter felt bad for the hardworking cops, and also for Deborah. He knew how they stewed in a hard boil of grief and rage, haunted by an unanswerable question: Why? There was no rational reason; closure was impossible.

It’s time to out the bastard,
he thought.
That much I can do.

As Snyder discussed the crime scene, Walter sipped his black coffee and listened.

On the evening of Friday, November 29, 1984, Deborah was working late on a computer project in Randell Hall, a landmark campus building, the detective said. The ornate stone edifice, built in 1901, was a huge labyrinth of classrooms and offices famously difficult to navigate.

At 11 P.M., Deborah called her parents’ home across the river in New Jersey from a computer lab. She said she had to keep working to finish the assignment due the next morning. Gifted at mathematics, her major, Deborah struggled with other courses, including computer science. But she was a disciplined student who put in the long hours needed to excel. She didn’t have a boyfriend, though young men were interested in her, and didn’t smoke or drink. She had modeled and played clarinet in high school but focused on academics in college. Living at home with her parents and commuting to Drexel, she kept her eyes on the future. “She wanted to be an engineer,” her sister Suzanne Leis had said. “She was determined she could do it.” A photograph of a new Mercedes-Benz sedan hung on her bedroom wall as incentive.

Her parents often fretted about their open, trusting, somewhat naïve young daughter working late in the crime-ridden West Philadelphia neighborhood. But Deborah assured them the engineering building was safe, and when she was done she would get a security escort to her car.

Two and a half hours later, at 1:30 in the morning, Deborah called home again and told her parents she still needed another hour to complete the project, but they shouldn’t worry. Her ex-boyfriend, Kurt Rahner, was there with her in the computer room. He’d wait and walk her to her car.

But Rahner didn’t wait. He left the computer room shortly afterward. On his way home, he asked a campus security guard to make sure Deborah got safely to her car, and the guard passed word to campus guard David Dickson. Dickson patrolled the campus on the midnight-to-8 A.M. shift, and was responsible for the computer room.

A few minutes after 1:30 in the morning, Deborah was alone in the lab, working on the computer, when she was attacked. At 1:38 in the morning, computer records show, she made her “last transaction” on the computer. It seemed hurried as if “she was interrupted,” said Drexel computer administrator John J. Gould Jr. “It looked like she stopped in the middle of what she was doing.” Snyder had reconstructed the likely events. Her attacker apparently surprised her and beat her into submission, Snyder said. Then he strangled her to death with an electric extension cord; the cord was discarded near the computer, its grooves matching the marks on Deborah’s neck.

At three in the morning, when her parents hadn’t heard from her, they reassured themselves she was sleeping in the computer room while pulling an all-nighter. In fact, by three in the morning, according to the coroner, she was already dead. In the huge, dark, empty building, her killer carried or dragged her body through the maze of halls and through a door that led to a protected concrete stairwell on the outside of the building. At the bottom of the cold, quiet stairwell on the bitter winter night, he continued to savagely beat her corpse with two bricks, a yard-long piece of lumber, and a strip of metal. The three makeshift weapons were found lying near her body, smeared with her blood.

At nine that morning, two passing students found Wilson’s body in the stairwell, on a landing eleven steps below street level.

As Snyder spoke, Fleisher passed around additional pictures of Wilson’s body, a bloodstain found in the computer room and the type of computer she was working on when she died, and the type of sneakers she was wearing. White Reeboks. White socks.

Fleisher joined Snyder at the podium and opened the floor to questions.

“What about the security guard? ” Fleisher himself started it off.

“Dickson was an immediate suspect,” Snyder said. He was the obvious choice. In police interviews, he was shaky about his whereabouts during the course of the evening. But he had an alibi: He told the other guard on duty he’d been talking on the phone with his girlfriend and forgot to escort Wilson to her car. He failed part of a polygraph test, but polygraphs are inadmissible in court. “We never had enough to arrest him,” Snyder said.

The questions came in a torrent.

“Was there a janitor on duty at the time?”

No, Snyder said.

“Were there any arrests for burglary made on campus that night?”

No.

“Have you tried DNA testing?” Heads turned to Halbert Fillinger, the veteran Philadelphia medical examiner. “There may be traces of the killer’s skin nuclei on the cord he used to strangle her if he gripped it tightly enough,” he said. “That residue could be tested for the killer’s DNA.”

Puzzled looks went around the room. DNA testing had not been available when Wilson was killed in 1984; nor was it a well-known technology eight years later. “It’s a long shot,” the
Los Angeles Times
reporter concluded. “But right now Snyder is willing to clutch on to any suggestion. He’s frustrated by his inability to move the case forward.”

After half an hour, Snyder slumped at the podium. The question-and-answer session was winding down, and he’d gotten little more than free lunch, moral support, and a few interesting ideas.

Suddenly Walter, whose habit, like the anchorman of a relay, was to take the baton at the end, spoke up. He frowned and adjusted his owlish black glasses on his aquiline nose.

“If I might offer an opinion,” he began crisply, “the key to the case is the absence of the victim’s shoes and socks.”

Snyder nodded. “We know the missing footwear was significant. We just didn’t know how.”

Walter nodded. “There is no robbery, yet her white Reeboks and white athletic socks are missing. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Not waiting for an answer, he raised more questions:

“The crucial question is, what is the value of the killing? What did he propose to get? Since he didn’t sexually assault her, what value was it? He tells us by the absence of the shoes and socks. He doesn’t want money. She’s still wearing her wristwatch. He doesn’t want a fuck. He wants the shoes. He’s a foot fetishist.”

Murmurs swept the room.

“Do foot fetishists kill for it?” a police officer asked.

“No, not often,” Walter acknowledged. “A foot fetish is a paraphilia, a sexual deviance. Afraid to engage a living and breathing sex partner, the fetishist uses the shoe as a stand-in for anyone his imagination can conjure. He gains a secondary or tertiary level of sexual satisfaction through sniffing and feeling and touching and rubbing the shoe, and maybe masturbating with it on him.”

To titters of amusement, Walter said, “Foot fetishes may be bizarrely amusing, but they can be very powerful and damaging. This is why the Chinese bound their women’s feet into a shape they could slip their dick into, and there was so much resistance to change. The whole culture was bound by the power and fantasy of this fetish.”

Walter quickly sketched his view of the crime. The killer is obsessed with women’s shoes; he collects them, masturbates over them. In all likelihood, he probably can’t even sustain an erection around a real woman. “It’s the representation, not the reality, he craves.” He has noticed Wilson before and her white Reeboks. He’s probably never killed anyone before, but his fantasy is escalating from merely stealing someone’s shoes to confronting the wearer.

Lost in his fantasy, somewhat akin to the Gentleman Rapist, he believes himself irresistible to women. Once he reveals his charms she’s going to say, “Where have you been all my life.” A large, powerful man, he intimidates Wilson when he enters the computer room, finding her alone. “He tries to chat her up for sex, or to go somewhere with him, form some sort of relationship, and she refuses. Possibly he threatens her, things like, she’s a whore being there alone and this or that, he verbally assaults her to scare her. It doesn’t matter to him. Either way it’s just a vehicle to get what he wants. He may tell himself he wants sex, a conquest, but we fool ourselves. Really he knows the bottom line is the shoes and socks.”

Wilson, like many victims in this situation, tells him no, timidly or forcefully, maybe she tells him to go to hell. It doesn’t much matter. The response is fury—the fury that sparks attack, murder, and postmortem attack. “Intellectually he knows she’s not going to cooperate, but on the level of fantasy when she tells him to fuck off or whatever he has an explosive reaction to the indignity. He’s had a power loss, not the power gain he dreamed of, and he goes ballistic. This is the energy that fuels the crime.”