The Murder Room (31 page)

She was Scott’s live-in girlfriend, she said. She’d found Dunn’s name on a telephone bill. Scott had been missing for four days and she was concerned.

Dunn was confused. “The only girl Scott ever told me about was Jessica.”

Scott had moved out completely, Hamilton said. He’d taken all his clothes and just left. Even the bed they shared was gone. The only thing he’d left behind was his car, still parked at the office. When Dunn heard that he felt a chill. “I knew then something was really wrong,” Dunn said. “Scott would never go anywhere without his car. It was his baby.”

Hamilton called again, and Dunn recorded her call. Now Walter asked to hear the tape. “She sounds so cold,” Dunn said, as the atonal voice filled the room. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” Walter raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

The police regarded Scott’s disappearance as a missing person case, but when his son hadn’t returned two weeks later, Dunn flew to Lubbock to push the investigation. Walter listened to Dunn describe his torment when he realized his son had been murdered.

Police ran a luminol test in Scott and Leisha’s emptied bedroom to detect any blood that might have been cleaned off the whitewashed walls. Luminol detects traces of blood as diluted as one part per million. When sprayed on the walls in darkness, even blood that had been cleaned up would interact with the chemical and glow with a blue luminescence for thirty seconds.

The walls glowed as if they had been painted blue. Huge waves and spikes of blood splashed halfway up the wall. There were blood splatters on the door, blood splatters almost to the ceiling. The room was a chamber of horrors. A blood bath had occurred there. DNA tests showed it was Scott’s blood.

Jim’s voice broke as he showed Walter the luminol test photos. Scott had died in that room, Jim was now convinced.

Police, too, were convinced they had a murder on their hands. But if Scott had been killed, they couldn’t find his body.

They’d combed the prairie with cadaver dogs and helicopters, turned over half the city dump, even brought in psychics, to no avail. “In Texas, the state can’t bring murder charges without a weapon, body, or body part,” the DA told Dunn. “You don’t have a case.”

With no body, police flailed trying to find suspects. They’d interviewed everyone Scott knew, including his colleagues at the car-stereo installation shop, but nobody stood out. Leisha was being very cooperative with the police. She didn’t know why Scott had up and gone, although she speculated that he may have run off with another woman—women adored Scott. She had no idea how her bedroom had become soaked with Scott’s blood.

The police thought she wasn’t being completely forthcoming, but they figured she was scared and they hoped to coax her into greater trust. They didn’t want to frighten her into not cooperating. There was no way the helpful, petite, twenty-eight-year-old woman committed murder.

Dizzy with grief, Dunn had pressed every power from the FBI in Washington to the governor of Texas, George Bush, to take an interest in the case, to no avail. He stalked the West Texas prairie looking for the body himself, and spent hours talking to psychics in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Dunn went to Texas and took Hamilton out to dinner to form an alliance with her in his cause. After that, Leisha kept calling, but her phone calls grew darker. One day she’d say she loved Scott and was doing all she could to find him; in warm tones, she expressed deep sympathy for Jim. The next day, she’d sound vague and distant, hinting that she might know where Scott’s body was, but Jim would never find him. Growing suspicious of Hamilton and frustrated by the police, Dunn did his own sleuthing. He traveled to New Mexico to investigate reports that Leisha had once been jailed for passing bad checks. But he was always eager to hear from her. Of everyone in the West Texas world where Dunn had sent his son, she seemed to know Scott best. Since she was the closest to Scott, Hamilton said, she thought it was only fair that she get his car. She kept pressing Dunn to give her the keys.

The thin man sitting in the Queen Anne chair had said nothing for almost three hours.

Dunn’s voice cracked. “Well, Mr. Walter, what do you think I should do? Is there a case here?”

Walter stubbed out his cigarette and stared hard at Dunn.

“Jim, aren’t you tired of being the grieving father?”

Dunn’s mouth fell open. “I . . . I thought that was what I was supposed to be.”

Walter shook his head. His jaw was clenched.

“No! You’re supposed to be goddamn mad! That bitch murdered your son! Let’s go get her!”

Dunn sat stunned as the profiler stared at him, awaiting a response.

Slowly, Dunn’s gaunt face creased in a big, toothy smile.

“I’m in,” he said.

 

But Walter still had concerns about Dunn’s emotional frailty, and he addressed them immediately.

“First we must encapsulate the difference between your emotional issues and the things we need to do with solving the case,” he said. “As for your love or anger or hatred or whatever else, you must express these things in terms of your son, but not let it bleed over into the case because it dilutes it and you start to misplace emotion into the structural issues and you don’t know where you’re at. I certainly don’t have a problem chatting with you about internal things, things that are important, but we need to do business on a different plane. We need a cold, businesslike approach.”

Dunn quietly nodded his understanding.

Second, he told Dunn, there would be no more phone calls to or from Leisha Hamilton.

“Jim, don’t you see what she’s doing to you?” Walter’s voice was filled with urgency. “Leisha is running a number on you! She’s trying to make you her next victim. She not only killed your son, she’s bragging about it, and killing you, too.”

Dunn’s eyes widened.

“She’s pulling your strings like a marionette,” Walter went on. “One minute she’s telling you she loved Scott, too, and the next she’s squeezing you about the car. And you, the devoted father, are too close to see the pattern. You don’t know how to deal with her because you don’t know what she is. What she is is a psychopath, and a good one at that,” he said. “And this is the biggest scheme she has ever played out. She is trying to shape you. She knew you would want to know where your son was, so she is laying the framework in hopes of deflecting your suspicion away from her.”

As Dunn sat quietly, in a well of contemplation, Walter shot him a look.

“Don’t you hate her—even a little bit?”

Dunn’s face flared in rage. The emotion exploded from him. “Hell, yes! I hate everything about her! But I keep thinking that as long as I can keep her talking, I may learn something about what happened to Scott. Maybe she’ll slip up.”

Walter took off his glasses and gave Dunn a stony stare that caused the father to lower his gaze.

“She murdered your son,” he said, his nose tipped in disdain as if she were not worthy of contempt. “You don’t need to cut her any slack. She’s not some sweet, innocent thing. We’re going to make sure she comes to justice. It’s all right to hate her. She’s a vicious killer and none of her bullshit is going to change that.”

Dunn reached for the newspaper clippings, as if he were eager to get to work.

“No,” Walter said sharply, waving his cigarette in the air. “I don’t need to see all these other bits and pieces right now. This is what happened: Leisha Hamilton is a psychopath. Your son was caught up in a web of sexual domination and manipulation by a very cold, powerful, controlling woman. She did him in.”

Walter stood and walked to the balcony window and looked out between the curtains. Traffic was crawling up Broad Street under a hazy yellow sun.

“She’s calling you and continuing to call you to shape you and control you, so what we want to do is take the power away from her and regain it ourselves. She’s manipulating you to gain information because information is power and to a psychopath it’s everything. The moral of the story is, limit your sympathy and chats with Leisha Hamilton because she’s playing you like a violin and you can’t afford it, nor can the case.”

Dunn blinked and swallowed. “I didn’t know what else to do—”

Walter cut him off. “Not a problem, Jim. You’re a grieving father. It’s not an issue of laying blame, it’s an issue of trying to blunt her aggression. We need the control instead of giving it to her. And we are just signaling by our meeting that we are taking control.”

Dunn nodded.

Walter saw a new color in Dunn’s face, heard emotional depth in his voice.
He still seems downtrodden,
Walter thought.
He needs to feel empowered.
Walter feared police had been hard on Dunn about his son’s lifestyle, which included dropping out of high school and minor drug possession. Dunn seemed to be struggling with shame.

“Jim, I know you’ve told me Scott had some issues, and had not yet lived the life you had dreamed for him,” Walter said.

Dunn nodded gravely.

Walter waved his cigarette impatiently, as if Dunn wasn’t getting the point.

“Look, Jim, Scott was in his early twenties, and sometimes kids do foolish things and get involved in issues that are high-risk. And sometimes those errors in judgment result in dastardly deeds. It would appear that Scott’s worst crime, so to speak, was judging the wrong person, and sleeping with the wrong person, and forming an alliance with the wrong person.”

“I know my son wasn’t perfect, but I was proud of his progress,” Dunn said in defense of his son.

“That’s exactly my point, Jim. Many times what young people will do if they feel they have failed their own class or standards is they will regress back to a lower class or group because the pressure for performance isn’t as great,” the profiler continued. “Then across time those who have any substance in them at all will repair themselves, pull themselves back up to the expected standard, and join their own class. I know that sounds elitist but that’s just the way it is.”

“I was excited for Scott because he was really turning things around,” said Dunn.

Walter nodded. “He’s staying away from drugs, doing well on his job. And while he’s screwing his brains out with Leisha Hamilton, as twentysomethings are wont to do, he’s found a better thing, the real thing, in Jessica. He’s working his way back to legitimate society. Then of course Leisha finds out she was going to be dumped and you don’t dump Leisha Hamilton, she dumps you. He had the bad fortune of forming an alliance with a violent psychopath. He’s not the first. They don’t call it ‘psychopathic charm’ for nothing.”

Dunn sighed.

“Jim, we’re not just solving a murder. Scott was cut short of his ability to rehabilitate himself and be honorable and productive. What we’re doing—part of the ethic of being a father—is to take up that challenge for him and make a strike for decency.”

“What do we do next?” Dunn’s eyes were fastened on the thin man.

“The Lubbock Police Department must call me and request my help. The Vidocq Society does not become involved in a case unless it is invited in with full cooperation by the police department. Until that happens, all we’ve done is have a conversation.”

“I’ll call them right away. They’ll understand,” Dunn said passionately. “They’ll have to.”

“Then it’s up to the police to call me,” Walter said, “or we have wasted our time. And another thing.”

Dunn appeared dazed. He was feeling relieved, emboldened, optimistic, and overwhelmed all at once.

The thin man’s face sharpened in the sallow light of the room.

“The Vidocq Society will help you as best we can. As for myself, I’m not going to let that bitch get away with murder.”

T
he week before Christmas a little blond girl, dead for thirty years, materialized on a screen in the City Tavern. The tiny figure, bruised and beaten, ashen face drained of life, shimmered in the midday sunlight in the front of the room. Fleisher started trembling. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

That morning in the Strawbridge & Clothier department store, he’d seen Ebenezer Scrooge quaver before the Ghost of Christmas Past in the store’s annual portrayal of Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. But the slain little girl before him now, nine-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty, was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, and Fleisher was not trembling in fear. He was shaking in fury.

Dougherty’s murder was one of the saddest and most disturbing images of his childhood. Carol Ann had been found raped and murdered in St. Mark’s Church in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb not far from Fleisher’s house, in October 1962. A fifth-grader at the parish school, she had been killed in an era when police and the public were not fully aware of the perverse sexual needs of many priests, or the long practice in the Roman Catholic Church of allowing pedophile priests, cloaked wolves, to prey on victims, simply transferring them from flock to vulnerable flock. Carol’s killer had never been brought to justice.

Now on the morning of December 17, 1992, as the Vidocq Society began its examination of the Choir Loft Murder, Fleisher converted his anger into a desire to fix the past. Thirty years, one month, and twenty-five days after the murder, Bristol police chief Frank Peranteau and detective Randy Moore stood before the society to present the case. Peranteau had said, “We need all the help we can get.” A series of articles in the Bucks County
Courier Times
by reporter J. D. Mullane had recently reawakened interest in the county’s coldest case. The county district attorney had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it. Chief Peranteau had inherited the case from Chief Vincent Faragalli, retired now for thirteen years, who had obsessed over it. Faragalli kept Carol’s picture in his wallet.

The case was always “ just out of reach,” investigators said.