The Murder Room (37 page)

By the time Pennsylvania State Trooper Stoud attended a Vidocq Society luncheon in Philadelphia in 1995, as a guest of a senior state trooper who was a VSM, he had investigated more than a dozen murders and read everything he could get his hands on about murder and murder investigation, including all of Douglas’s and Ressler’s books, Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood,
and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Yet he was deeply frustrated. In his thirties, he wanted to advance his career.

Walter had given a talk at the Vidocq luncheon about his murder subtypes. He discussed his method of solving the most notorious murder in modern Australian history—the brutal slaying of beauty queen and nurse Anita Cobby. Stoud was dazzled. He was desperate to become a profiler, but after reading all the books, there wasn’t any more to learn.

Mindful that “you had to find a profiler to show you the road so you can walk it yourself,” he approached Walter after the luncheon and asked if he could study with him, and was swiftly rejected. Late that night, he called Walter at home in Michigan, repeating his request to “be a learner.” Walter snapped at him, “I said no, did you hear me? I’m not interested. You’re too normal, a family and all the rest. I’ve tried this before, and it’s never successful. It would be a waste of my time and yours.” Half an hour later, Stoud called back and said, “I was just hung up on, but I won’t take no for an answer.” Walter cursed him out; Stoud said, “I’m going to keep calling.” He called the next night, and the next. Gradually, the younger man and the older developed a dialogue. They discussed murder cases in the news, murder cases they were working, the nature of evil. Walter allowed himself to wonder if Stoud had the brains, the guts, the character, and moral fiber, to be his protégé. “You must learn to think horizontally as well as vertically,” he said, “which very few of us in the world can do.” Walter nurtured hopes the younger man could follow him, could stand witness to and stand against the worst evil human beings did to one another.

 

Walter drove over the icy hills in his aging Ford Crown Victoria to the Green Gables tavern. The car had 120,000 miles on it, and was always breaking down. Walter was always getting lost. Stoud pointed out he needed new shocks and brakes, and he snorted in reply, “You know I don’t care about those things.” The state trooper marveled at how little he knew about ordinary life—cars, computers, the World Series—for a genius.
I guess he’s saving it all for sadism, necrophilia, and Munchausen syndrome,
Stoud thought.

Walter said that after a lifetime immersed in ghastly murders, he had decided to reinvent himself as a country gentleman. What was left of him, that is, after years of forays into the abyss and back again—little but the broad egg-shaped pate of his forehead, the consumptive cough, the withered frame hardened or wasted by unknown disciplines and battles with darkness. He wanted to pursue the good life.

Stoud smirked. “How many cars have you owned?”

“Seven.”

“All black Crown Vics, like police cars?”

“Yes.”

“And you ran them all into the ground.”

“Yes.”

“How many suits do you own?”

“One.”

“Color?”

“Blue.”

“And you wear it into the ground.”

“Yes. Then I get another one. One does.”

Stoud grinned. “If you’re a country gentleman, I’m Earl Grey. You’re a cop.”

Walter laughed. “’Tis true.”

N
umber 1704 Locust Street in Philadelphia was a dreary Victorian brownstone wedged among an imposing white-marble classical music school and the fashionable hotels and shops of Rittenhouse Square. An awkward wrought-iron staircase twisted sideways to a tall, forbidding black door with a tarnished knocker. The second-floor window was clumsily off center, like a misplaced proboscis. It appeared lost, an archaic, slightly seedy gent in a topcoat and homburg. A series of small and vaguely mysterious brass plaques on the brick wall to the left of the door got smaller as they descended, until the last one could be covered by a man’s hand:

On the second floor, atop a white-marble nineteenth-century staircase, were the new offices of the Keystone detective agency and its director, William L. Fleisher. Fleisher had retired from his federal career on December 31, 1995, and, true to his reputation as a workaholic, had taken all of two days off before starting his new career. On January 2, 1996, he partnered with VSM Nate Gordon to open the full-service private-eye shop under the slogan “the FBI for the other guy.” On the same floor as the Keystone agency was the Academy of Scientific Investigative Training—their school for teaching the polygraph, with classes everywhere from down the hall to Dubai. The small warren of offices was also the first headquarters for the Vidocq Society, outside of home offices, trunks, and briefcases.

The agency door opened into a big room with a red Persian rug and Oriental prints on the walls. The secretary, Gloria Alvarado, sat next to a Victorian mantelpiece adorned with a bust of Vidocq, and a gray cadaver skull Fleisher’s father had used in dental school in the 1930s. Down the hallway were the offices of Gordon; former Philadelphia police detective Ed Gaughan; and a couple retired FBI agents, all members of the Vidocq Society. Fleisher’s office was a small, pie-shaped space with a leaded casement on a back alley. The shelves and walls were cluttered with awards and bric-a-brac, including a schooner in stormy seas painted by Michelle, a 1940s Psycho-truth-ometer, a picture of his father in Navy blue.

Gloria buzzed—Ron Avery, the
Philadelphia Daily News
columnist, was in the waiting room.

“Send him in.”

The press loved the commissioner of the Vidocq Society, and Avery was an old friend. Now Fleisher sat back in his swiveling leather chair and listened as Avery said he was writing a book about historic Philadelphia crimes and looking for ideas. His thesis was that in 315 years it was tough to match the City of Brotherly Love for corruption and murder.
City of Brotherly Mayhem
was his title.

“My specialty.” Fleisher grunted. “You need five books for this. What do you have so far?”

Avery had dug dirt as far back as founder William Penn’s son, William Penn Jr., who was charged with assault during a drunken free-for-all in the early 1700s. The pastor at Christ Church—the church of George and Martha Washington—boasted of bedding the congregation’s prettiest ladies, and fights and duels erupted. There was the nineteenth-century monster H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. Gary Heidnik, the cannibal minister of the 1980s, and his “House of Horrors,” Ted Bundy’s early years—he was leaving most of them out. It was an embarrassment of riches; there was too much. And there was one more.

“The Boy in the Box,” Avery said.

The moniker sent Fleisher back in time. As Avery described the case, he saw himself as thirteen years old again, standing in front of the poster at the Penn Fruit Company market while his mother shopped. The hollow eyes in the sad pale face of death came back to him, his first brush with death.

The case, Avery said, had never been solved. The homicide bureau had taken a collection and paid for a monument, the only monument in Potter’s Field, where the unnamed boy lay with rapists, murderers, body parts, and the indigent and forgotten. The detectives had the stone inscribed “God Bless This Unknown Boy.” Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator who had been assigned the case in 1957, had continued to investigate it in his retirement, keeping it in the news with his annual visits to the boy’s grave. Bristow had died three years earlier, and with him a lot of the public interest in the case.

After Avery left, the resurrected image of the poster lingered in Fleisher’s mind. As a boy he’d dreamed of solving the terrible crime, becoming a hero of the city. As an adult, he’d known many of the cops who became the boy’s tireless champions.

He went home to Michelle and the kids and dinner, but it stayed with him. It bothered him that for four decades someone had got away with the coldest murder he’d ever known. It bothered him that nobody had come forward to say, “That’s my child.” It bothered him that the boy lay yet in Potter’s Field, the graveyard for the forgotten and shamed purchased, in biblical tradition, using thirty silver pieces returned to the Jewish priests by a repentant Judas. “It’s not right,” he mumbled to himself at his desk in the pale lamplight, failing to concentrate on a corporate theft case. They were simple words that were the marching orders of his life. A sharp feeling came unbidden, but the large, bearded head wagged as if to shake it off. It was ancient history, a boy’s dream. The man was too busy solving today’s crimes.

He tossed and turned that night. He imagined the nameless boy all alone under the moonlight beneath the frozen crust of Potter’s Field.

J
ohn Martini was a flashy Phoenix restaurateur, a high roller and a charmer filled with dark American dreams. He started as a mob hit man, worked his way up to FBI informant, and became one of the most brazen serial killers in modern times. By the time he reached death row, he was terrifying to look at, as if his body was indeed the smoky window of his soul—enormous, fat, balding, with huge hands and a broad, pockmarked face, loose fleshy lips, big hooked nose, glowering dark eyes. He was a pro who allegedly killed for New England gangster Raymond Patriarca. But he’d freelance killing friends and relatives if the money was good—including, police believed, his aunt and uncle.

He was a bad guy, in other words, for a woman to be introduced to by one of her best friends. That’s what happened to Anna Mary Duval, a retired New Jersey office worker who’d moved to Arizona. Her new friend Martini persuaded her to put $25,000 in a hot real estate investment, and told her to meet him in Philadelphia in the fall of 1977 to complete the deal. Martini kept Duval’s money and killed her, too—his version of a real estate closing.

Now, in 1997, twenty years later, Martini finally admitted to killing Duval and was convicted of her murder—brought to justice by the art and vision of Frank Bender.

“This guy Martini is the worst,” Bender said, “except for maybe Vorhauer. He’s too far out there even for the movies—sort of
Goodfellas
meets
Scarface
.” Bender, Walter, and Fleisher were having lunch in a Center City diner.

“Richard, as a psychologist, how would you handle this type of criminal?” Fleisher asked.

Walter sneered in disgust. “Seven cents’ worth of lead.”

When Duval was introduced to the forty-four-year-old, Bronx-born Martini, the brother of one of her best friends, she was impressed. She was apparently unaware that he had served federal time for hijacking a truckload of women’s underwear in New Jersey, or that the FBI considered him one of the “nastiest” criminals in America. She couldn’t have known—not even the police did—that Martini also had been on the FBI payroll for more than a decade, tipping off the bureau about hijacked trucks in New York and New Jersey.

In October 1977, Duval flew through Chicago to Philadelphia, where Martini picked her up at the airport. He introduced her to another gentleman, an off-duty policeman, quietly sitting in the backseat behind her. Minutes later, the man in the backseat pulled out a handgun and pumped three bullets into the back of Duval’s head, execution-style. The two men dumped the body near the airport. Martini later told police that the shooter was his apprentice. He was teaching the cop how to “work on a contract, you know, killing people.”

The Duval murder sent Martini on a wild killing spree. He was the lead suspect in at least four murders for which he was never charged, including the shooting deaths of a cousin and his former son-in-law, and the shooting and stabbing of his aunt and uncle Catherine and Raymond Gebert in their Atlantic City home (Martini was awarded $175,000 as the benefactor of his aunt’s estate).

By the fall of 1988, Martini was running from the law and desperate for cash. He was nursing a $500-a-day cocaine habit, being sued for divorce, and had recently lost his longtime employment with the FBI because of his “dishonesty with the bureau,” according to court records. In October in Arizona he shot and killed his drug supplier and her companion. Three months later, with his girlfriend-accomplice Therese Afdahl, he kidnapped Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse executive Irving Flax at gun-point. Martini, cleverly eluding an FBI trap, extorted $25,000 from Flax’s wife for his safe return, and put three bullets in Flax’s head anyway. Finally arrested in a nearby hotel, Martini was convicted in 1990 for the kidnapping-murder. He was sentenced to New Jersey’s death row, where he was also convicted of Duval’s murder, and given a concurrent sentence of life in prison for killing her.

“Duval’s family said in court they were happy about the conviction and sentence,” Bender said. “They felt it showed their mother’s life had worth.”

“Frank, you are truly amazing,” Fleisher said. “What you do for law enforcement can’t be duplicated.”

That spring of 1997 was a season of triumphs for the Vidocq Society. At the April 18 luncheon in the Downtown Club, a gruesome image appeared over the white tablecloths: The decayed corpse of a twenty-seven-year-old woman lay between hedgerows in a remote part of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, apparently strangled to death. The case had languished with the Pennsylvania State Police for six years. Walter and other VSMs picked a prime suspect before dessert. “It is not, in this case, rocket science,” Walter said.

The victim’s twenty-four-year-old live-in boyfriend was a pizza deliveryman with no criminal record. But he had abused and threatened the victim, and drew additional attention to himself with his unusual nickname, “Ted Bundy.” It was one of many truth-too-strange-for-Hollywood moments in the Murder Room, and as it happened, a herd of Hollywood types was at the round tables listening.