The Murder Room (44 page)

 

In September 1998, Sergeant Cloud noted a significant fact in Keefe’s DUI, his only offense on record. When Keefe was stopped while driving under the influence, on the front seat of the car was a pack of cigarettes.

Keefe was a smoker; Newport Filters.

Thanks to the forensic savvy of VSM and medical examiner Hal Fillinger, who had performed the autopsy on Brooks fifteen years earlier, the police had DNA samples of the killer. Fillinger had carefully saved the hairs on Brooks’s clothing, and the skin lodged under her fingernails during her desperate fight for life, having no way of knowing how useful the genetic material could be fifteen years later. The material contained the DNA of a male human, but was it the genetic material of Alfred Scott Keefe?

Early one morning in October, Keefe walked out of his mother’s house in the one hundred block of Horseshoe Lane in Warminster Township—the historic burg where William Penn signed his treaty with the Indians—left a bag of garbage on the sidewalk, and returned inside. He was unaware that Warminster had been alerted not to pick up his trash that morning. Falls Township, twenty miles away on the Delaware River, would be providing the service.

Officer Nelson Whitney, who had been watching, quietly drove an unmarked car up to the curb on Horseshoe Lane, grabbed the garbage bag, and drove away. Back at the station, he and Sergeant Cloud were pleased to find a treasure in Keefe’s trash.

It was a cigarette butt. A Newport Filter.

They sent it to the lab to test for the presence of DNA in dried saliva.

Walter chuckled when he heard. “Maybe cigarettes are bad for your health after all.”

A
lfred Scott Keefe, a skinny man with nervous dark eyes, was sitting in a windowless interrogation room the size of a storage closet. The cops had taken him from the pizza parlor and he smelled faintly of mozzarella cheese, cigarettes, and body odor. He was seated in a hard wooden chair, with his back literally against the wall. Two pneumograph tubes crossed his chest. A cardio cuff clamped his arm. Galvanic skin electroplates pinched his fingers. The large shadows of Vidocq Society Members Bill Fleisher and Nate Gordon, sumo wrestlers in suits and two of the best polygraph examiners and interrogators in the world, were very close.

Keefe had volunteered to come in from his job making pizzas that afternoon to answer questions to clear himself. He’d agreed to take the lie-detection test. But now his whole body was vibrating as if the scientific instruments were medieval irons holding him fast, and the cool, mechanically repeated questions the incessant falling of a whip.

Gordon asked him if he had killed his fiancée, Terri Lee Brooks.

Gordon could make a man who had something to hide very nervous. Sitting directly in front of the wan Keefe, Gordon was a hulking man, bald with a white fringe of beard, a disarmingly high, quick voice, and hyperalert blue eyes. He had the bulk of an offensive lineman, a black belt in karate, a master’s degree in criminology, was credited with numerous innovations in lie detection, and published in scholarly journals like
Radiology
articles such as “Brain Mapping of Deception and Truth Telling About an Ecologically Valid Situation: An MRI and Polygraph Investigation.” He began his forensic lectures by shredding conventional assumptions with razor logic; he ended them by splitting a brick in half with his head.

Fleisher could play “good guy” to Gordon’s “bad guy” if necessary. Fleisher could play it any way you wanted. With the FBI and Customs, Fleisher had literally written the federal book on detecting lies in the human face. Seated on Keefe’s right, the Vidocq commissioner was dapper in his brown suit and neat gray Old Testament beard, leaning forward into the green glowing monitor of a computer, where the polygraph test whirred and dipped its digital judgments.

Were you engaged to Terri Lee Brooks? Did you cause the death of Terri Brooks? Do you know who killed Terri Brooks? Did you use a knife to kill Terri Lee Brooks? Where were you when Terri Brooks was killed?
Gordon pounded the same question from a dozen different angles; Keefe volleyed back with terse, controlled denials. But the rest of his body was telling a different story.

For a guy who claimed to have done nothing wrong in his life but skimp on the pepperoni, his sympathetic nervous system was going haywire. His head shook like a bobble-head doll’s. His hands were sweating like he was on a bad first date. Nothing was clipped to his eyebrows, which exploited their freedom by twitching.

Fleisher stared at the computer screen and quietly shook his head, a small, controlled motion of amazement. Keefe’s physiological responses were charted immediately as waves moving across the green-glowing monitor, rising and falling like a miniature emerald sea.
Deception all over the lot,
he thought. In his decades conducting and teaching the polygraph in New York, London, Rome, Dubai, Keefe was a record breaker. His blood pressure was spiking. His breathing was slowing. His sweat gland activity was not what you’d expect of a bereaved fiancé. Homicide generates stronger emotions than any other crime, and Gordon and Fleisher were expecting big reactions. But this was something else—these were the biggest reactions they’d ever seen.

Keefe’s nervous system was stirring up a perfect storm on the monitor. Whoever was watching behind the one-way observation glass was getting a show.

It was February 4, 1999, the fifteenth anniversary of Terri Brooks’s murder. Richard Walter had read the tea leaves at the murder scene and predicted that Brooks’s killer would be a man in his late thirties with an unkempt appearance who held a menial job and lived with his mother. Alfred Scott Keefe, pizza maker, age thirty-eight, lived with his mother.

In the hallway had gathered the combined powers of Bucks County law enforcement, waiting to pop the champagne on the biggest cold case in county history. The group included District Attorney Alan Rubenstein, a man with ambitions to be a judge, eager to crack what he called one of the “most brutal, heinous, and malicious homicides” he had ever encountered. There was Police Chief Arnold Conoline, the reformer hired to clean up a troubled department. One of his first moves had been to assign his detective sergeant, Wynne Cloud, to reopen the cold case. There was Cloud’s ambitious young patrolman, Nelson Whitney II, working his first murder case, who scored the coup of quietly convincing the pizza maker to voluntarily come in for questioning from his job at the pizza parlor in Horsham, some twenty miles away. There was the deputy DA who had worked long hours on the case with Sergeant Cloud and Officer Whitney. VSM Ed Gaughan, the private eye and former Philadelphia homicide investigator, was on hand, eager to help crack the case he had brought to the Vidocq Society. The police had also invited VSMs Fleisher and Gordon with their polygraph equipment to assist in the interrogation if necessary. Though often challenged about its usefulness, the polygraph, in the hands of experienced examiners like Gordon and Fleisher, had been shown to be accurate in measuring truth versus deception better than 95 percent of the time. Few doubted its value as a tool to help pry loose a confession, or the fact that the Vidocq men were two of the most accomplished polygraph interrogators in the world. The men and women in the hallway behind the glass were confident he had done it, as confident as cops could be with DNA evidence in hand.

The DNA evidence was indeed damning. The trash that Whitney collected from Keefe’s curbside had yielded a treasure: the Newport Filter cigarette butt was Keefe’s brand. Testing of the dried saliva on the cigarette revealed male caucasian DNA—the same DNA found in the hair on Terri Brooks’s clothes, in the blood on the knife protruding from her throat, and in the bits of skin from under her fingernails that she had clawed off her attacker.

But was it the DNA of the other male caucasian living in the house, Keefe’s brother, Charles Keefe? Whitney tailed Charles Keefe to a restaurant, watched him smoke a cigarette, and retrieved the butt from the ashtray after Charles left the restaurant. Lab testing showed that Charles Keefe’s DNA did not match the DNA found on Terri Brooks.

It was technically possible that there was some other male caucasian DNA in the universe matching Alfred Keefe’s, and he was the wrong guy. But the odds were long—one in five quadrillion. If Keefe was going to find someone else to take the fall, a thousand new planets with five billion human beings on each would have to be discovered quickly.

Alfred Keefe was the killer.

All they needed now, after fifteen years, was a confession.

Whitney and another officer had started the interrogation shortly after 6 P.M., when Whitney brought Keefe in from the pizza parlor. As hours passed without a confession, Gordon and Fleisher had paced the hallway like caged beasts. Gordon lobbied the chief hard to let him and Fleisher go in with the polygraph. Keefe had had fifteen years to get his story together, and he had it down. He’d kept the interrogators at bay for hours with a cigarette and a sneer. Gordon and Fleisher believed the cops had not properly focused the interrogation, and squandered away the hours out of inexperience.

In Gordon’s view, the young officers had let Keefe get too comfortable by taking an extraordinarily detailed statement from him—where he was born, his mother’s name, and so forth. Keefe never felt pressured; interruptions didn’t help. A technician came in, swabbed Keefe’s cheek for additional DNA material, and left. Keefe was made to feel important, the center of attention, in control—not like the hunted man he was and needed to feel like to break.

Then the police began to run out of time. If the police didn’t bring Keefe before a magistrate on charges within six hours, they’d have to let him go. But letting Keefe go, now that they’d showed him their hand, was unthinkable. He’d have time to think up a better story, time to go twirl pizzas in Patagonia.

In the hallway, Gordon was about to explode. The police interrogators weren’t even detectives, Gordon thought. Patrolmen handed out traffic tickets, they didn’t bust down killers.
What are you going to war with cavalry for when you got the fighter jets on the run-way itching to attack?
he wondered. Finally the chief nodded to the Vidocq examiners to give it a try. Whitney left the interrogation room, and Gordon and Fleisher went in.

They’d been hammering away at Keefe now for more than an hour, watching the green digital sea whip into a frenzy, and Keefe was weakening. Fleisher looked over at Gordon and knew he was thinking the same thing:
The guy’s bombing the test as bad as anyone,
and his guard was down.

Fleisher stared hard at Keefe. It was time to go in for the kill.

“You blew it,” he said. “Your charts are some of the clearest ever. And they got the DNA. You’re doomed.”

Confronted by Fleisher with the overpowering evidence, Keefe seemed to lose the last of his composure. He was off balance, ready to drop.
We could get a confession in two minutes,
Fleisher thought.

Fleisher glanced at Gordon, who nodded his assent. Despite their drive to nail Keefe, their honor as VSMs was more important: Their role was to provide advice and counsel, “not steal anyone’s thunder.” Both men abruptly stood, told Keefe to stay seated, and left the room to find the cops.

Chief Conoline agreed his men would take it from there, finish what they started. He told Whitney and his partner to go back in. Fleisher asked what they thought of Keefe’s violent shaking when they watched through the observation window. The cops shrugged. They didn’t think anything. Nobody had been watching at the observation window.

Minutes later, the police adopted a new strategy. Whitney and his partner were joined by a uniformed officer said to know Keefe personally, and the three cops marched Keefe out of the small interrogation room and into a large, comfortable conference room and shut the door. Gordon and Fleisher exchanged puzzled looks. Twenty minutes later, with no confession emerging from the new room, Gordon couldn’t stand it any longer. He walked up to Chief Conoline and said, “I’m going in.” The chief nodded OK.

As Gordon opened the door, he saw the problem right away. Four faces around a long conference table turned to the huge bald man with the intense blue eyes.
The room set-up is horrible,
he thought.

Keefe was sitting nonchalantly at one end of the table, leaning close to the table. He was calmly smoking a cigarette, with an ashtray in front of him.
He’s too comfortable,
Gordon thought.
He looks like he’s about to have dinner
.

Keefe was using the expanse of table as a barrier to protect himself. “There can be no barriers between you and the suspect,” Gordon noted later. “You have to be in his face.”

Whitney was seated at Keefe’s left, going through a pile of photographs of Brooks’s corpse. One by one the officer showed Keefe the gruesome photographs of the bloodbath, as if their horror held great power. He told Keefe the police thought he was involved. Keefe was calmly shaking his head no. The uniformed cop who knew Keefe was on his right side, sitting up on the table nodding. “We think you were involved.”

The third cop sat opposite the suspect far across the long table, nodding his agreement, too.

Keefe drew on his cigarette, tipped it into the ashtray, and said coolly, “No, you got the wrong guy.” His eyes went from man to man.

Gordon knew that Keefe couldn’t be “induced by guilt and remorse into a confession.” Walter had advised the Vidocq agents and police not to even attempt it. With an anger-retaliatory or AR, “all attempts to create remorse will fail spectacularly, just empowering the suspect ARs who aren’t capable of guilt,” Walter said. “They’re not like you and me.”

Walter gave the example of a classic AR case he had worked of a lovers’-lane killer in upstate New York. The murderer viciously attacked a young couple, raped the woman while the boyfriend watched, then pumped twenty-five bullets into both of them. Arrested within an hour of the slaughter, the killer was sitting in the back of the police car en route to the police station, drenched in his victims’ blood, when he fell asleep. He was tired. “Anyone can understand it,” Walter said sarcastically. “He’d been very busy. It was a long day. Typical AR—absolutely no guilt.”