The Murder Room (35 page)

The eyes and voice now went flat as prairie and held there, unshakable. “Then I guess I don’t have an alibi.”

Walter appeared to be lost in contemplation, then stared balefully over his horn-rims.

“Leisha, I’ve noticed you seem to have a great ability to attract men, especially younger men. Now, granted I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m tired. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what they see in you. Can you explain it for me?”

A startled silence filled the car. She smiled awkwardly. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Is it because of all the sexual tricks you’ll perform for them? Because you are a sexual Disneyland?”

“I guess so.” She nodded sharply. “I’ve got to get back to work.” She opened the door, and she was gone.

English sat stunned. “Richard,” he said. “Am I mistaken, or did you just call her a dog?”

Walter grinned conspiratorially. “I thought I did.”

“But why?”

“I wanted to see how she reacted to unexpected situations, to see how quick she was in her thinking and what her game was all about. And it worked. It’s plain that her game is all about power—power and control. She’s a good little psychopath, so information is crucial to her power. I planted seeds of doubt, as well as direct information I wanted her to know, such as she is a suspect. I wanted to create some anxiety and I succeeded.”

Walter lit a Kool. “Leisha thinks she is smart enough to outwit everybody and can play a cat-and-mouse game with the police. What we must do is make her feel insignificant—unimportant. This will drive her crazy and she may well make a mistake.”

The detective nodded.

“But it won’t be easy. It’ll take time and patience. She’s very strong, very powerful. I looked in her eyes and saw she was having fun. It was a game and she was in control. I knew then without a doubt that the bitch killed him.”

 

Shortly after he returned to Michigan, Walter opened a package from Detective English. Out fell a single piece of white paper on which was drawn “quite intriguing original art.”

It was Hamilton’s pencil sketch of the murder scene—a crude, childlike drawing that documented the prolonged torture of Scott Dunn.

The drawing showed an empty bedroom with a wooden pallet in one corner to which was chained a stick-figure man, labeled “S.” At the bottom of the drawing was a legend or key depicting handcuffs, a needle, a knife, a gun, and a sketch of a penis and scrotum.

The middle of the drawing showed the “S” man running across the room toward an open door, with the sun shining outside promising freedom. But the “S” figure collapses before the door and dies; a ghost of “S” leaves the body.

Studying the sketch, Walter thought,
Scott suffered worse than I imagined.
The gun was clearly used by Leisha and perhaps a confederate to subdue the bigger, stronger Scott with the handcuffs and tie him to the pallet; the needle would have been employed to keep him doped up for forty-eight hours of torture with a knife, fists, and a blunt instrument that delivered the fatal blows to the head. The “companion ghost” next to the fallen “S” figure indicated Scott had died trying to escape, Walter said. “Furthermore, the future, through the door, is clean and unused.”

The drawing of “detached genitalia” indicates Scott suffered “sexual abuse with a dildo, or, more than likely, it was representative of emasculation,” the forensic psychologist wrote in a formal report for the police. Walter believed Scott had been cut in pieces and disposed of in a way that he would never be found.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked Detective English.

“An ex-boyfriend she took up with after Scott by the name of Karl Young. He gave it to me in a coffee shop, looking nervously over his shoulder the whole time. She scared the shit out of him. He thought she’d killed Scott and had Tim Smith clean up.”

“Of course he’s afraid,” Walter said. “This is an extremely powerful woman. She gets what she wants when she wants it, and God forbid if you get in her way.”

The drawing indicated that Hamilton had chained Scott to a pallet right where their bed had once been located. A coroner and blood-spatter expert determined, by the angle of three drops of blood on a far wall, that Scott had died from three lethal blows to the head.

It was Hamilton’s “pictorial of the murder scene, a keepsake,” Walter said.

“This is a classic,” he added. “It’s her personal pictorial diary of the murder. Rule number one is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is, until he or she stops deriving pleasure from it. Scott Dunn is dead, but for Leisha Hamilton, it isn’t over yet. She drew this to memorialize her achievement. She gains fresh pleasure each time she looks at it.”

The drawing confirmed his profile of Hamilton as a power-assertive killer, a woman who was “a user and all about power,” he said. “She has to be the top dog, the alpha dog, the bitch if you will. You don’t break up with or dismiss Leisha Hamilton. She dismisses you. I see lots of anger, rage, domination. ‘You’re going to leave me, are you? Now try and leave me, bitch.’ That sort of thing.”

Torture was a favorite method of power-assertive killers. In this case the pictured implements of torture were all “masculine symbols” employed in the PA’s goal of total physical dominance. Simply shooting Scott wouldn’t provide the necessary pleasures. “Her real payoff was the close-up use of fists and knives and whatever inflicted terrible pain. Her goal was to crush, destroy, extinguish her betrayer.”

Hamilton had made dramatic changes in her life that also were classic post-murder behavior. Few cops understood how killers used murder to stimulate personal growth. It was a very dark self-help movement—“I’m OK, You’re Dead.”

“Murder helps the killer grow, or enjoy the illusion of growth,” Walter said. “It’s the culmination or resolution of a long series of internal issues, and they use it as a springboard to change. That’s why killers often make dramatic post-crime life changes. They find God or new love, move far away, get in shape, and so on.”

Since murdering Scott, Hamilton had dropped Tim Smith, whom Walter believed she had seduced into helping with the crime, and took up with Young, a local restaurant cook, with whom she had a child. Meanwhile, she attended nursing school, while continuing to work as a waitress, and graduated at the top of her class. She was living the American Dream. Leisha Hamilton was going places.

“Her success doesn’t surprise me,” Walter told English. “I always said she was extremely intelligent—psychopathically bright and charming. But the nursing school is really quite rich. If you’re accused of being a murderess, draped in the black robes of torture, how do you ritually cleanse yourself of all suspicion? You enrobe yourself in white and become a healer.”

Walter saw Hamilton as a brilliant and cunning adversary, “a highly skilled psychopath.” She had gotten away with murder for years. She had brazenly killed Scott Dunn, toyed with his father, manipulated lawyers, cops, and the justice system as easily as she had a parade of lovers. She had seduced and bullied a whole circle of men, through raw sexual power and intimidation, to assist her in murder. The waitress had destroyed her betrayer in the very bedroom where he had deceived her—a waitress rising to the role of a vengeful queen.

She was a poor woman’s Clytemnestra, the queen who slew King Agamemnon for his affair with the prophetess Cassandra, striking him in their royal bed with a “threefold hammer blow.”

Curious, Walter found his old college copy of
Agamemnon
by Aeschylus, “The Father of Tragedy,” and thumbed through the ancient Greek classic to the murder scene. It caused him to raise an eyebrow:

It was murder as self-improvement seven centuries ago. Clytemnestra, like Leisha, had blossomed
“
.
. . from that drenching marriage-rite the woods, the spring burst forth in bloom. And I, I cause it all.”

The profiler judged the drawing worth adding to his collection of original murderers’ art, which came in handy as a teaching tool. It included a watercolor by an Australian male nurse-turned-serial killer and a classic portrait of Pogo the Clown by John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago contractor, Democratic ward heeler, and clown-for-hire at children’s parties convicted in 1980 of murdering thirty-three men and boys and burying most of them under the floorboards of his house.

Jim Dunn was devastated by the documentation of his son’s torture and the idea that the perpetrator of torture not only got away with murder but was using it to inspire personal achievement and growth. It gave him the defeated feeling that “Leisha wins in the end.”

“Not at all,” Walter said. “By attempting to reinvent herself and escape her past, she only further identifies herself as the murderer. Leisha is a drama queen, a remarkable woman, in an evil way, for a trailer-trash waitress. But she’s not especially well-educated, and she doesn’t seem to realize that dramas end in tragedy.”

 

It deeply offended Walter that “a bunch of psychopaths were getting away with murder. They were trying to pass over the ruse on society that Scott Dunn had just disappeared as if he had never existed. There are standards to uphold in civilization. This kind of thing cannot be allowed to stand.” The police weren’t buying his conspiracy theory, but Walter was convinced Mike Roberts, a muscular six-foot-four young man who worked with Scott, knew something about the murder.

Roberts had quit the Lubbock stereo shop shortly after Scott’s disappearance and moved to Tacoma, Washington—classic post-crime behavior. While on business in Seattle, Walter made a side trip. He asked the police to pull Roberts out of his workplace onto the sidewalk, then sent the cop to get some coffee.

“It’s time for us to have a man-to-boy chat,” Walter said, leaning close to the muscular young man. One of Roberts’s shirt buttons had come undone, and Walter observed his heart thumping wildly against his chest.

Roberts jumped back. “I remember you—the Englishman. I’m scared of you. Should I get myself a lawyer?”

Walter noted Roberts was “a fine liar, never losing eye contact,” but the tall man’s jumpy Adam’s apple gave him away as well, slithering up and down “with great rapidity.”

“Young man.” He glared. “If you have not been involved in murder, you needn’t call a lawyer. If you have been involved in murder, however, I daresay a lawyer won’t help. I’ll chew your dick down so far you won’t have enough left to fuck roadkill!”

T
he mansion in the remote Pennsylvania Appalachians was filled with the gloaming of twilight, except for the lamp in the parlor where the thin man lounged on an eighteenth-century Italian divan, a king Kool perched in two fingers haughtily aloft. “Oh, it’s a
wonderful
case,” Richard Walter said, as he glanced at a photograph of the doctor who had been shot through the heart by his best friend, a lawyer, some twenty years earlier. “A man desires another man’s wife and simply takes her. It’s quite common. It happens to be the plot of the novel
The Talented Mr. Ripley,
as well as, I might add,
Hamlet.”

“I see retirement hasn’t affected your confidence,” snickered state trooper Steve Stoud, a dark-haired, broad-shouldered man in his thirties sitting in a wing chair opposite Walter. Corporal Stoud’s brilliant cold-case work had recently put the murderous doctor behind bars, and earned him membership as one of the young lions of an aging Vidocq Society.

Walter laughed—laughter that dissolved into a hacking cough that left him bent over red-faced like he was expelling a lung. His smoker’s cough was getting worse.

Night fell with the utter darkness of the country and the hush of the surrounding ridge-and-valley Appalachians. The parlor was the largest of twenty-two rooms in the Greek Revival mansion. There were seven bedrooms and seven fireplaces, rumors of ghosts and the Underground Railroad. A grand stairway soared for the needs of society; back stairs shuttled servants from sight. It was Biddle House, a country retreat built in the 1830s by the illustrious Biddles of Philadelphia, including Nicholas Biddle, the disgraced president of the Second Bank of the United States, his bank and his career destroyed by President Andrew Jackson. Walter lived in the house alone.

“Didn’t a doctor just tell you to quit?” Stoud teased.

“Yes.” Walter frowned. “I told him, ‘My dear boy, I am quite obviously aware of the risks and pleasures of smoking, and you see I have made a bargain with which I am quite pleased—I had a choice of being a thin man and enjoying life or being too fat to fit into my coffin. So let nature do what she will, I will have the last word—with sodium pentothal one can lie down to quite pleasant dreams. . . .’ ”

Stoud shook his head. “Jesus, Richard.”

“I explained that I am a Scorpio, one who would rather destroy himself than lose control, and one who thrills to attack.”

As he composed himself and took a sip of Chardonnay, Stoud, big hand around a can of beer, said in a teasing voice, “Richard, speaking of suicide, I’ve found a note. . . .”

“Oh.” The thin man leaned forward expectantly, his left eyebrow arched in a fine point. The two men collected suicide notes. It was a friendly competition.

“A guy in Georgia shot himself in the head, left a note, ‘Some say death is the end of life. Some say life is part of death.’ I say, ‘Let’s put the fun back in funeral!’ ”

Walter’s eyes shone with merriment. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” he enthused. “The best yet. I quite like it.” It illustrated the kind of point the police had such trouble accepting: At the dark edges of human behavior, the cruel and the tortured did not think or feel like the rest of us. Murder could be fun! Suicide could be a joke!