The Murder Room (30 page)

He did not apologize for it. It was the cost of being R. Walter, bane to psychopaths on four continents. “With psychopaths I am far more predatory and in control, using a surgeon’s knife, in the superior position rather than being vulnerable to the biological charms of addiction,” he said. “And I am
always
in the superior position.”

Walter had many friends and more than a few enemies. Some forensic scientists refused to sit next to him at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention because he verbally destroyed presenters every year. Friends described him as a shining blade, too sharp for everyday use. Walter saw life, as Teddy Roosevelt once did, as a test of manhood. “One of the final tests as a man matures,” he said, “is to identify those things one loves enough to protect.” He’d risk his life to protect or avenge man, woman, or child. Like Roland and Siegfried in the old and forgotten stories, he would go alone into the cave in the dark with the sword when it counted. A week after Walter’s trip to Scotland Yard, FBI agent Robert Ressler had signed a copy of his new book,
Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI,
“To Richard Walter, My good friend and fellow monster slayer.”

 

The red light was blinking on the telephone in his hotel room.
A goddamn red light,
he thought.
Who the hell wants me now?
He was planning to go to the bar. He wanted to hear only five words the rest of the night: “What will it be, sir?”

Reluctantly he picked up the phone. There were two messages. The first was from Bill Fleisher welcoming him to Philadelphia—and asking a favor.

“Richard, would you call Jim Dunn? He’s a bereaved father from Bucks County whose son disappeared a year ago in west Texas, a murder; the cops haven’t a clue. The case has got your name on it. Jim’s a good guy, and I felt sorry for him. Maybe you can find a way to help him when you’re in town.” Scowling, Walter wrote down the number.

The second message was from Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard, the queen’s coroner. Shepherd, a good friend, had introduced Walter to the Scotland Yard audience. Shepherd was tall, commanding, a wicked wit, a pilot (bored with an AAFS convention in Chicago, he rented a small plane and flew over Lake Michigan), and a pathologist of “unsurpassed brilliance.” Walter hoped he was calling to apologize. By the end of his speech Walter felt he’d done passably well, parried with the critics, held his own. Then Shepherd pulled the doozy.

With a twinkle in his eye, Shepherd flashed a photograph of a murder scene on the screen. Lying on his back in the middle of a tidy, middle-class parlor was the corpse of a man who appeared to be in his sixties, prosperous, with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing a wool shirt and casual, around-the-house gabardine trousers.

At first glance it looked like a heart attack or a stroke. But on closer inspection it was evident the trousers were unzipped at the fly. The man’s penis had been cut off. There was very little blood, considering. There was no knife or other weapon in the picture—and no penis. The penis was missing.

Walter had never seen the photo before. He didn’t know the case.

“Let’s see what the profiler can really do when he’s got nothing to go on but the crime scene,” Shepherd said. “Richard, the question is, what happened here? What does the photograph tell you? Who killed this man? And why?”

Walter’s eyes gleamed with the challenge.

Walter quickly sized up the victim by his age and condition and asked himself:
How many circumstances can you think of where somebody’s going to lose their dick?

Then:
This dick was punished for doing something. What did it do?

Walter ran through the possibilities.

He was murdered by a jilted lover or a vengeful husband. But the body said otherwise. “If it were a jilted lover, I would expect to see additional trauma on the body, hitting in the face and head, the sating of that anger. This was just cold and calculated, in and out.”

He was murdered by a jilted homosexual lover. The missing penis put him in mind of a homosexual murder in California in which the jilted queen murdered his lover, “who had a big dick, and he chopped it off, put it in the freezer, and was suspected of continuing to use it.”
But if it were gay lovers you’d also see the highly emotional hitting and striking to try to achieve catharsis through all that anger and pain. The killer in this case made it clear the penis wasn’t important to him. He just wanted to deprive the guy of his penis. He may have thrown it in the sewer or whatever. It had no intrinsic value. He wasn’t a pervert putting it in the freezer and sucking on it as a lollypop.

He was murdered by a random sex killer acting out dark fantasies on a stranger.
But if it were a sex killer, I would see more ritualistic things done to the body, such as excessive deep stabbings, leaving the body in a contorted, symbolic pose, the taking of souvenir body parts.

Having ruled out sadism and fantasy as motives, Walter was left with power or anger. The anger-driven killer over-killed from fury and inevitably covered the victim’s eyes, or threw him in a closet, as a final, “Take that, bitch!” This victim’s eyes were staring straight up, uncovered. The body was lying just as it had fallen, and was otherwise unmarked.
One must always study the absence of evidence as well as the presence, and in this case the absence is important.
There was no sign of over-killing from profound anger.

The cold, efficient nature of the crime was the essence of it. The power-driven killer reacts to the sense of being wronged from a challenge to power rather than anger. Now the cold efficiency of the crime made sense.

Walter sensed the crowd waiting.
Given what we have here and what we don’t have, what are the remaining possibilities of an errant dick?

He was killed for making an unwanted homosexual advance on another man.
But if the guy tried to suck his dick or feel him up or whatever else, he would have coldcocked him and knocked him in ninety-three different directions. The parlor would be a mess. Nothing in the parlor seems disturbed.

A couple of minutes had passed when Walter spoke aloud: “I believe the victim was a pedophile rapist who was murdered by the father in vengeance for the crime he committed against his son. In a nasty little work of symbolism, the father cut off the pedophile’s dick. He bled to death.”

Shepherd slowly grinned and said, “That’s right.” The murder victim had forced a twelve-year-old boy to have oral sex, he explained. The killer was the boy’s father, who had avenged his son. In the audience, jaws went slack. The American was precisely right.

Now, in his hotel room, Walter allowed himself to reflect on the victory.
I earned my respect.

He looked at the clock, after ten, not too late. With a groan, he picked up the phone number Fleisher had given him and dialed.
My sense of duty is inviolable
.
It’s damn annoying at times.

Duty also told him now to let it ring five times, no more. On the third ring, Jim Dunn picked up.

Walter introduced himself. “I’m a psychologist, Mr. Dunn, whose basic expertise lies in profiling serial killers. From the little Bill Fleisher has told me, I suspect my skills might be of some use to you.”

The man on the other end of the telephone sounded stunned, then guarded—as if he hadn’t grasped the fact that his son had been murdered in cold blood.

A
t eight o’clock in the morning, Richard Walter and Jim Dunn sat in Walter’s room on the seventh floor of the Hershey Hotel, enveloped in brown gloom and cigarette smoke. Broad Street lay below in the bright spring sunshine of May 1992, but Walter had pulled the drapes to screen the bothersome light and noise. The profiler sat erect in a Queen Anne chair, a picture of stillness with his eyes closed. Dunn, a tall, silver-haired man with a craggy face and nervous blue eyes, faced him in a matching Queen Anne. On the table between them, Dunn had piled the notebooks, tapes, and newspaper clippings that chronicled his son’s murder. There was a pot of room service coffee, two cups, and an ashtray with a Kool sending a lazy plume to the gathering cloud on the ceiling.

Walter opened his eyes and arched his brow. “It sounds like you’re hurting, Jim,” he said. “How may I help you? Tell me what you have. Tell me about the case.”

Walter had spotted Dunn in the lobby at twenty paces. The deduction was instantaneous. The man’s elegant suit, shiny wing-tips, and silver hair bespoke the mature, prosperous gentleman of the telephone call the night before. The craggy, Scots-Irish face was open and bright-eyed in a manner unusual in the Eastern cities, more likely in a self-made man of southern mountains or western prairie. The suit and tie were too elegant by half, clearly the best suit and tie the man owned—the armor of a man girded for battle and feeling overwhelmed. Yet it was the eyes that neatly summed up the rest of the fellow and indicated it could be none other than Jim Dunn. “I have seen often in the parents of murdered children the eyes of a medical dog sniffing for cancer patients,” Walter said. “He had expectant and engaging eyes that held the lightly masked sadness of loss. There is an ethereal sadness that underpins such a man,” he said. “A sadness of the universal concept, not just feeling sad but a condition in which loneliness, mystery, and all the major universals seep into the bones. They often smile and whatever else but they rarely if ever belly laugh.” He’d seen parents destroyed by that burden. Walter took special note that the man’s briefcase (overstuffed, overburdened, like the man himself ) was brown rather than black. The more pliant color was a hopeful sign, suggesting emotional vulnerability and capability of wisdom and growth (rather than unyielding rigidity). Flexibility would be the most important trait of all if it was genuine, the undoing of the whole affair if it disguised weakness.

Walter had suggested they “go up to the room for a cup of coffee, a smoke, and a little chitchat.” As Walter studied Dunn’s gaunt face and hollow eyes in the yellow lamplight, he recalled his misgivings of the night before. A man weakened by grief and self-pity could not bring his son’s murderer to account. Walter smiled to himself as Henry VI came back to him: “Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.”

A man’s grief could not be denied but it must be “set apart. The pain had to come out first.” Walter tented his fingers beneath his gaunt face. As Dunn spoke, Walter’s small blue eyes varied from steely interest to the softness of utmost patience. The angel of vengeance took many forms; in such a conference, it began with Walter as the ferryman poling parents of murdered children through blood tides of woe.

Dunn had been working late on that Sunday evening in his Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home office when the phone rang. He thought,
It must be Scott.
The Sunday calls from his twenty-four-year-old son, who had moved to Lubbock, Texas, to make a new life for himself, were a father’s joy. Dunn had urged the move; Lubbock was his beloved childhood home, a friendlier, more wholesome place than the East Coast, a place for Scott to start over. Scott had struggled in school in the East. He tried the U.S. Air Force, then tried community college in Texas and dropped out, but after that things started to come together for him. He had a good job, a job he loved and excelled at. Scott had always shown a mechanical gift. Even as a boy he could take apart anything and put it back together. Now in Lubbock, he got a job in an electronics store installing stereos—and became a star at it. He was a West Texas stereo cowboy. The region had rodeo-style competitions in which the “cowboys” vied for prizes, money, and prestige for the fastest installations and highest quality sound. Scott dominated the competitions. He’d found a way to maintain sound quality at unheard-of volumes by stacking ice on the system. His trophies filled the store. An athletic six foot two, 195 pounds with blond good looks, “The Iceman” also starred in the store’s TV commercials. Women came into the shop to meet him. He’d loaded his own car—an ’87 Camaro he called “Yellow Thunder”—with the finest stereo equipment, and took it booming down the prairie highways. He’d recently told his father he was bringing home for Thanksgiving a young woman named Jessica, a bright, lovely Mississippi State University student—his soon-to-be fiancée.

But the flat, cold voice on the line was someone he’d never heard of.

Her name was Leisha Hamilton.

“Are you Scott Dunn’s father?” she asked.