The Murder Room (47 page)

Over steaming coffee, Walter lit a Kool and said, “As a point of fact, there are only about five of us profilers in the world who know what we’re doing. The rest who claim to be profilers are fucking charlatans and frauds.”

The cops grinned. It was true that profilers were getting a bad name in some quarters.

“In truth, I prefer the term ‘crime assessment’ to ‘profiling,’ ” Walter continued. “Now because of all the TV forensic dramas and the amateur hour on the nightly news the public thinks profilers are wizards who come out of caves with their fantastic visions or some Borborygmic grumblings, but you can’t get there from here. The frauds read our stuff and give flip out-of-context assessments like, ‘He’s driving a blue car and hates women.’ It doesn’t work that way. Like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work. We’re talking probabilities and years of experience with similar cases, and analyzing them through the psychological continuum as well as the crime scene continuum.”

Walter tipped his chin and blew cigarette smoke to the ceiling. “Gentlemen, let me explain the case to you in terms of a crime assessment.”

Many factors, he said, including the remote burial of the young woman’s corpse, suggested the victim was a prostitute. Power-driven killers “love to kill prostitutes,” and when they do they dump the body as if disposing of trash. This type of killer typically makes a bold assault to the head, a straight-on attack, and here “we find that the victim’s skull has been smashed, the apparent cause of death.”

The half of a zipper police found near the surface of the grave was a valuable clue. “With this type of killer,” Walter said, “we often find that the clothing of the victim had been forcibly torn off.” According to a police report, four teeth of the zipper were damaged. Detective Keith Hall led the painstaking effort to find and interview the zipper manufacturer and learned that “the damage appears to have been caused by the slider pulling out over the teeth when the zipper was forcibly pulled apart.”

“Given these and other factors and probabilities, it’s highly likely that the killer is in his early to midtwenties, an ex-con, very muscular, lifts weights, macho, emotionally primitive, arrogant, drives a pickup truck, has girlie magazines lying around.”

“As it happens,” he went on, “Updegrove fits the profile. That’s not to say he did it. But it was a guy like him, happy brandishing guns or other weapons—a guy with a criminal record.”

They left with pages of notes, and cookies in freezer bags.

W
omen around the wealthy, seventy-one-year-old Alabama businessman had a nasty habit of disappearing. So when he called the police to report his second wife missing, he was a suspect. Thirty years earlier, he had murdered his former mother-in-law—strangled and then stabbed the dead woman thirty-seven times with an ice pick—then returned home and told his first wife, “Our life is going to change. I killed your mother.” He had done only thirteen months in a reformatory, then received a partial pardon from Kentucky’s governor.

“That’s one for
Bartlett’s Book of Perverse Quotations,
” Walter said. He was intrigued as the Alabama police presented Vidocq Society Case No. 112 at the August 2002 luncheon. He was afraid the suspect was a rich, brilliant, experienced psychopath too smart for the police. But he was more concerned that afternoon by his uncharacteristically glum partner. Bender had buried his eighty-nine-year-old mother, Sarah, in June. Bender had previously buried his father, Francis A. Bender, and taken the unusual step of participating in his father’s autopsy. Holding his father’s heart in his hands, Bender had tried to understand and make peace with him. Now his mother was gone, and Bender looked like he was holding her heart, too.

That summer Bender felt as if the other dimension was shadowing his daily life. He and Walter flew to Chicago to make a joint presentation, “Criminal Case Studies,” to the Federal Bureau of Prisons national training program. After the lecture at the Chicago Hilton, two nuns who worked in prisons approached the artist and profiler with rosy praise, broad smiles on their faces.

“You two do the work of angels,” one said.

“Killer angels, perhaps,” Bender said.

Walter was taken aback. He was quite sure that if a God had made the world He would not have created Theodore Bundy, but he held his tongue and mumbled a polite thank-you. Though it made him profoundly uneasy, he had to admit the seraphs of God seemed to be following him.

At Christmas, he had received an unusual gift—a crystal obelisk depicting an angel—from a young Pennsylvania couple who had long suffered the agonies of grief, fury, and uncertainty over the unsolved murder of the wife’s brother. He had met them at a convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, and his heart went out to them, as it did all the woebegone men and women at POMC who called him, there was no getting around it, “the avenging angel.”

Yet it was not merely vengeance the profiler peddled to the stricken; it was wholeness and health. He had volunteered his services in the name of the Vidocq Society to speak to parents about the unspeakable, to wield sword or soft words, whatever tool necessary to vanquish their demons. “Their tormentors are all in the mind,” he said. “Either their own or the mind of their child’s killer. It’s a matter of bringing the darkness to light.” Just he, it seemed, could explain it all.

Only at POMC conventions could one find a hotel conference room filled with fifty mothers whose children had been murdered. At the Cincinnati Westin they gathered to hear a talk on murderer subtypes, earnest faces turning to the tall, balding, bespectacled, thin man they had seen rushing through the hallways in his dark suit like a blade.

He began his lecture by asking jauntily, “How many of you folks have not heard my little talk before?” Hands went up. “Liars!” he bellowed, and they roared with laughter. He approached a woman in the front row with a small trash can. “Madam,” he said, “if you are about to eat that butterscotch candy, please unwrap it and put it in your mouth now. I will not have plastic crinkling whilst I attempt to speak.” They gasped and laughed again. They loved him. Blasphemous, courtly, reeking of smoke and profanity, they loved him. After the speech, one by one, the mothers filed into a small smoking room of the hotel for private meetings with Walter in his cloud of Kools. In gentle, ten-minute confessionals, each gave a capsule description of their child’s murder, answering the detective’s questions—was the body face up or down? Was the knife at the scene?—and one by one they left with palpable serenity, careworn faces smoothed in some sense of peace. “He told me why Brian died,” an Asian woman said, leaving the confessional in Cincinnati. “For the first time I know. Now I can really grieve and heal.”

Walter had the mind to discern and the heart to explain within the limits of human understanding why and how a heart of darkness took their child. He gave evil its place, however difficult, in the human family; saw shapes and forces at work that others did not. He was, one journalist said, the Stephen Hawking of the universe of the damned.

Bob Meyer, a retired Tampa doctor, and his wife, Sherry, told Walter they were devastated to the point of emotional breakdown by the senseless, vile murders of their daughter Sherry-Ann Brannon, a lovely thirty-five-year-old blonde, and grandchildren: Shelby, seven, and Cassidy, four. The murders had occurred in Sherry-Ann’s large, new dream house with pool in Manatee County, Florida. There was no sign of forced entry. Meyer was convinced his son-in-law, Dewey Brannon, who had recently left the dream house and Sherry-Ann for another woman in the midst of a contentious divorce, was the killer.

Police also considered Brannon the main suspect. The most intense six-week murder investigation in county history had revealed that it was Brannon, estranged and banned from the house on Father’s Day, who had called 9-1-1 for help on the morning of September 16, 1999. He told the dispatcher he’d found the bodies of his wife and older daughter and thought it was a murder-suicide, but then he saw that Cassidy was badly hurt, too.

He was cradling the four-year-old, dying from multiple stab wounds, in his arms.

“Sir. It’s gonna be OK, all right,” the dispatcher tried to calm him.

“It’s NOT gonna be OK,” he replied. “I’ve got two dead people here ’cause of me, all right. So just get somebody out here.” Three little words—the colloquial for “because of me”—had the whole county convinced Brannon was the killer, reporters wrote.

But as the crime lab did its work, all the physical evidence at the scene pointed to Larry Parks, a forty-seven-year-old landscaper who had recently dug the family’s pool. Parks’s DNA was found in a piece of skin under Sherry-Ann’s fingernail. Parks confessed that he was “mighty high” on cocaine and crystal meth that morning when, after a failed night of hunting hogs to sell for cash for more drugs, he knocked on Sherry-Ann’s door with the ruse that his truck had broken down, and forced his way in intending, he said, to rob her. When she fought back, he stabbed her ten or more times with a kitchen knife, went upstairs and stabbed Shelby to death in her bedroom, then dragged Cassidy downstairs and stabbed her in front of her dying mother.

Even though Parks pled guilty in exchange for three life terms—to avoid the death penalty—Bob Meyer said the case was destroying his family. He wanted Larry Parks dead. His wife had tried to enter the courtroom for Parks’s trial with a gun in her purse, an attempt at frontier justice all too common at POMC. His son-in-law, now exonerated, had plunged over the wooden railing to try to kill Parks. As deputies handcuffed him and took him away, his wife shouted toward the judge and Parks: “He killed our babies!”

Bob Meyer, boiling in anger and confusion and still suspecting his son-in-law, said he just wanted the truth: How and why could a human being do such things, and was it Parks, and why him, or his son-in-law? He asked for Walter to help. The Vidocq profiler studied the case file, and then flew to Tampa on Meyer’s request to sit in on Parks’s sixty-seven-minute confession to six attorneys and police officers. Afterward, Walter told Meyer that the killing, down to the last detail, was a perfect expression of Larry Parks’s history, personality, and character. Parks was “absolutely the killer and the only killer. He’s the purest, coldest power-assertive killer I’ve ever seen.”

The Meyers continued on their imperfect path of healing, but Walter remained concerned about Bob and Sherry. Passionate about music and baking, Sherry no longer found pleasure in her hobbies. She was dropping weight, growing sickly. Grief, Bob said, was literally killing her. Walter returned to Florida and walked in the door demanding one of Sherry’s “famous tangerine pies.” She said she didn’t feel like baking. “I want it now!” he insisted. She was out of tangerines, and the stores were closed. “Well, let’s go find some damn tangerines.” They drove country roads together until Walter spotted a tangerine tree behind a diner. The fruit was too high; laughing and scheming like schoolkids, they got a ladder. The pie was delicious. Late that night over Scotch, Bob confessed he was haunted by dreams of vengeance against Parks that sounded like something out of ancient Athens. “I’ll deny it if you tell anybody,” Meyer told the others, “but I want him blinded. I want Mr. Parks to live in prison not knowing what’s coming at him for the rest of his life.”

“As it happens, it’s not uncommon for one to have such feelings,” said Walter. “Indeed since the Greeks, it was deemed important to vent them in appropriate places—to the courts, to family, to friends, to one’s god—until we find our way again.” He left knowing there was still work to do.

Joy and Brian Kosisky also had a murder in the family that was ruining their lives. Joy’s brother had been murdered in Greenville, Pennsylvania. In gratitude for his work in helping them understand the case, the couple had sent him the crystal obelisk for Christmas. As Walter turned the glass in the sunlight, there appeared in the crystal the delicate lines of an angel, acid-etched into the interior of the glass.

“An acid angel,” he mused. “I quite like that.”

Now the acid angel, ensconced in a cloud of cigarette smoke, sat in his Chicago hotel room the day after his presentation with Bender. Before him sat a pair of Urbana, Illinois, police officers with their bulky cold-case file. The police from the southern Illinois city had presented one of the most notorious and puzzling cold murder cases in the state’s history to the Vidocq Society the previous spring, March 15, 2001. It was the 1988 murder of the wealthy, popular University of Illinois veterinary student Maria Caleel, a case that had earned Urbana police little but frustration and embarrassment for fourteen years.

After hearing Walter’s luncheon theory on the murder, police sent him the case file. They had driven the 140 miles from Champaign-Urbana to meet him while he was in Chicago and hear his thoughts.

“Gentlemen, now that I’ve read the file,” Walter said with a grim smile, “let me explain the case to you.”

The file for the fourteen-year investigation had grown to more than 1,600 pages. Police had accumulated forty suspects, but never made an arrest. “I’ve read the 1,600 pages on the computer, so I couldn’t make notations,” Walter said. “Nonetheless, I eliminated thirty-nine of the forty suspects. In the course of events, one is the killer, who has flown all these years just below the radar.”

“The killer was obviously someone Maria knew,” he continued. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning on March 6, 1988, Caleel was asleep in her garden apartment in Urbana when someone knocked on the door, or perhaps entered using a key. Her attacker struck in the dark, grabbing her from behind and plunging a six-inch knife upward and deep, precisely nicking her heart, and fled. As Caleel crawled to an apartment across the hall, dying from a single stab wound, a female student called police and asked her, “Who did this to you?”