The Murder Room (49 page)

Even the planned Vidocq Society movie was getting media attention now, helping attract more cases, more chances to help the helpless. The movie “will be full of thrills, murder, mayhem, and disgust,” Walter told a Binghamton, New York, newspaper. “A typical day for me.”

But Fleisher’s optimistic view of human nature had been challenged that fall by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A number of VSMs answered the call, including forensic dentist Haskell Askin, a leader of the identification effort in the New York medical examiner’s office, and Utica College forensic anthropologist Thomas A. Crist, who worked night shifts at the Fresh Kills Landfill sorting human remains from other materials and rubble brought by barge and spread over seven acres. Richard Walter was contacted by shadowy figures in American intelligence asking if he could profile Osama bin Laden.“Why of course, said I,” he related.“He, like Stalin and assorted other monsters of history, is a malignant narcissist. He is all about power; religion is a guise. Ultimately he will be defeated because he can’t take a step backward.”

Fleisher said America and other nations must “find the evil animals responsible for this horrific act . . . and dispatch all of them back to Satan. However, it’s critical for the global community to acknowledge that true Muslims around the world are good, religious people who equally abhor what these traitors to true Islam have done.” He issued a fresh call in the
Vidocq Society Journal
for VSMs “to live by our motto, Veritas Veritatum, and help protect ALL innocent people from prejudice and hate.”

Now as he reentered the war room, he looked down at the fax and his face brightened. “Good news. The suspect confessed to killing Lorean Quincy Weaver, the Girl with the Missing Face that Frank identified.” Fleisher threw the paper fax on the table, and Bender and Walter took turns studying it. The police dispatch warmly congratulated Walter for his profile.

“Richard’s profile was right on the money,” Fleisher said with pride, as Walter smiled graciously, and Bender’s face fell. “Way to go, Richard.”

The killer was a macho ex-con known for carrying weapons, and he’d struck Weaver in the head, just as Walter predicted. But the killer wasn’t Robert Updegrove, the ex-con who found the grave and Walter said also fit the profile.

“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender said. “Rich, you’re not always right.”

Walter rolled his eyes, wondering how to fend off the coming attack. For once, he wished his partner would be satisfied with the remarkable role his forensic art had played in bringing a killer to justice.

“Frank, you’re going to push me only so far.”

The Vidocq Society had lost track of the case in the two years since Bender completed his facial reconstruction. The department had transmitted the image widely to police departments and the media, with no results. Keith Hall, the officer who led the investigation, had left the small department to become a detective with the Onondaga County sheriff ’s office, taking his passion with him. The case had gone nowhere.

Then in September 2001, Thaddeus Maine, a bright, young Manlius officer, was ordered by his commander to throw out hopeless cold-case files, including that of the Girl with the Missing Face.

But as Maine looked over the old files, he was intrigued. He had guarded the grave five years ago, and had hung a photograph of Bender’s bust on his office wall. It was still there, staring down at him, a coffee-colored woman with a broad nose and lips, close-set eyes, and a high forehead fringed with short curly hair. He saw decency, and a world of pain, in those eyes. They chilled him. He liked the woman, whoever she was, and felt sorry for her.

Maine decided to make a few phone calls. A respected investigator, he had been given permission to look into any worthwhile cases one last time before shredding them, but he had been asked to do it quietly. He began to interview residents of nearby farms, asking about itinerant laborers who had passed through the area more than ten years before. Hundreds of phone calls later, he came across the name of Roland Patnode, an American Indian carpenter from Massena, New York, on the Canadian border who had rented a cabin on a farm within sight of the grave—the same cabin Updegrove rented years later.

Patnode quickly became Maine’s chief person of interest. The six-foot-four, 230-pound man, a great high school athlete who’d earned a wrestling scholarship to college, had served time for a 1986 murder committed within the likely range of time the Manlius victim had disappeared. While working as a carpenter in Syracuse, Patnode was convicted of murdering a transvestite prostitute. At the July 1987 trial, Patnode claimed he’d stabbed David McLaughlin, twenty-two years old, to death in the throat after discovering the slim figure in a dress giving him oral sex was “not a female, it was a man.”

The jury, apparently sympathetic to his lawyer’s claims that a “sleazy homosexual transvestite . . . duped this poor country boy,” found Patnode innocent of murder and convicted him of man-slaughter. After serving only four years in prison, he’d violated parole and fled to Canada. Rochester police, Maine learned, considered Patnode a possible suspect in the disappearance of several prostitutes, including a missing person from 1986 named Lorean Quincy Weaver.

Following routine procedure, Maine got a copy of Weaver’s mug shot from Rochester. As he studied the young black woman’s short hair, wide mouth, and soft eyes, he literally felt a jolt running through him. While the faces were not identical, he felt certain it was the same young woman who was staring at him from the bust on the wall. He ran down the hall to two superior officers with the photographs and his gut feeling; they all felt the same thing. When they “compared the photo to the bust prepared by Mr. Bender,” a police report later said, “we were certain we had identified the victim.”

It was Lorean Quincy Weaver, twenty-six years old; when her mother saw a photo of the bust she said, “I always wondered what happened to Lorean.” DNA from Lorean’s relatives matched DNA taken from bone marrow in the scattered remains. Police were amazed that Bender had captured her personality in the bust, as well. Lorean, they learned, was a sweet young woman who never wanted to be a prostitute but started as young as fourteen, and never made much money. Her story was the rare one that touched the cops. “She was unlucky,” said Manlius Sergeant William Becker, “right up to getting in the car with the wrong man.” She had last been seen alive getting into a pickup truck in late 1986 with Patnode.

In February 2002, two Manlius detectives went to interview Patnode at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill about the murder of Weaver. Patnode, thirty-nine, had just been picked up on his parole violation from an Indian reservation in Canada, expecting to serve only a few months on the minor infraction. Then the interrogators put Weaver’s picture in front of him, and his eyes filled with tears. “She’s my ghost,” he said. He confessed to the murder twelve minutes into the interview.

Patnode admitted to killing her in late August or early September 1986. As Walter reviewed the confession, he saw that the crime was a “classic” fit for the profile. Patnode went looking for a prostitute after drinking in a downtown bar, he told detectives, and picked up Weaver and paid her twenty dollars for a sexual encounter in his pickup truck. When that was done, he told her he was breaking up with his girlfriend and wanted a second, more extended sexual encounter, but Weaver objected. Patnode began to force her and she slapped him. He slapped her back hard, four or five times in the face, and then began punching her. She drew a small knife and cut him in self-defense.

“She kept trying to fight me off, but I was much bigger than her,” Patnode said. “I then grabbed her around the neck with both of my hands and started squeezing. I couldn’t stop, and I was feeling so angry. She was trying to get out of my grip, and I kept squeezing her neck. I don’t remember how long I squeezed her neck for, but she slowly stopped moving, and she went limp.”

Patnode began to drive home, wondering what to do with the body, when suddenly Weaver moaned and tried to sit up. Patnode said he grabbed a framing hammer from the center console of his truck and struck her on the head four or five times until she stopped moving. In a three-page confession, he also admitted to sexually violating the corpse before burying her at the edge of a field off Salt Springs Road in Manlius.

The Manlius detectives realized that Richard Walter’s profile was correct in another respect—Patnode was a serial killer. It was a month after killing Weaver on October 1 that Patnode picked up transvestite prostitute McLaughlin and killed him, and he was a likely suspect in other murders.

Weaver’s body went undetected for eleven years. Patnode had all but gotten away with two murders, and might never have been brought to justice if he’d buried Weaver deeper than eleven inches—and if Bender hadn’t been willing “to take a long shot rather than no shot at all.” In October 2002, Patnode was convicted of the murder. As Patnode wept and apologized, Judge Anthony Aloi sentenced him to the maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life in state prison for committing “an unbelievably heinous, atrocious, and cruel act.”

“Lorean Weaver may have been your ghost, Mr. Patnode, but she was a human being. She was a daughter. She was a sister. She was a mother. She was a memory to her family. She was a crack in their broken hearts for all those years. . . . Mr. Patnode,” he said, “you should remain in prison for the rest of your life.”

Lorean’s daughter, Schmillion Weaver, an infant when her mother disappeared, thanked the police for bringing justice to the killers. “I feel closure now,” she said.

“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender repeated. “Rich, you got the wrong guy.”

“Frank,” Walter said wearily, “I’ve told you a thousand times a profile is not a suspect. It’s a description of the traits of the likely suspect based on a crime assessment, including the signature at the crime scene and a series of other probabilities. The profile was on the mark.”

But Bender, his eyes shining with glee, seemed not to understand or care about the distinction. The Girl with the Missing Face, the case everyone said was impossible, had turned into one of his greatest triumphs. And Walter had named the wrong guy.

If God had made Lorean Quincy Weaver the first time, Bender had re-created her in clay the second time, and he would never let Walter forget it.

T
he crowns of great trees made shadowy tracings on the moonlit peak, but the upstairs windows of the Greek Revival were black. Hedges hid the downstairs panes in shifting walls of darkness. The only light came from the far rear of the house, the orange glow of a cigarette floating under the proscenium arch of the music room. Sitting at his beloved 1926 Chickering grand, a classic American piano he had “stolen from a fool quite ignorant of its value,” the thin man placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the lid of the piano and his hands over the keys. He let his mind go, free as the cigarette smoke wending lazily in the faint moonlight by the spray of ostrich feathers in a black vase on the lid. The thin man, so disciplined to the cold beauty and rules of order, was consciously summoning chaos.

Of its own impulse a finger struck middle C.

He had started at dusk with a variation on Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, gloriously filling the house with music as it drained of light. Now, from the single key, a song of his own creation leaped into existence, spontaneous and brilliant. “I play my mood,” he said. He let his mood soar mightily, exalted in the knowledge that he was creating something new that would never fall on ears other than his own and he would never play again.

He had been a musical prodigy as a youth before the opera of the streets turned his head. Music was his joy, but also a discipline he practiced to enter the labyrinth of the criminal mind. “I do not know a great detective without musical sense,” he once said. “The problem the police often have is that one cannot analyze human behavior with merely logic. You can’t do it. Man is a creature of associative thinking.”

In the thrall of the creation he no longer sensed the darkness beyond the piano, the moonlight on the windowsill, the cigarette smoke bending in the soft breeze from the garden.

Walter was a proud scientist, disdainful of things of the spirit, who lived by strict rules of evidence, the logical assessment of a crime scene bathed in the unsparing light of deduction. Among murder investigators he was often reputed to be the coldest mind in the world. He worshipped the god of reason. Yet his was a classical mind finely tuned to the Doric columns and classical harmonies of his house, stubbornly resistant to modern illusions. Many in our time have forgotten, he said, that “reason is born of twins—rational thinking and emotion. When one denies emotion, it’s still there—we’re animals—and it bites you in the ass, expressing itself now as anger and vehemence. The Greeks struck this balance best.”

The warring Greek gods—Apollo, the sun god of order, forms, and rationalism; Dionysus, the wine god of revels, chaos, ecstasy—shared the same temple and space in men’s hearts, forever in conflict. “As it happens,” he said, “Apollo was the Greek god of detectives; Dionysus was the god of murder.” A man could not think clearly without recognizing both sides of his nature, could not unite them without art or music.

As he played he closed his eyes and saw a boy materialize. He was a small boy in a dark wood on a winter night and he was very cold. He was tied up, perhaps to a tree. The boy was shivering and naked but did not cry anymore. There was an old church in the distance and maybe the boy heard its bells ringing. The night was clear and filled with stars. He felt terrible pain but even stronger were things he not could name, fear, confusion, sweet pleading love, anger, degradation, terror. Maybe he tried to speak but it’s not likely he could get a word out by then. He was not alone. The person who loved the boy the most, who had always taken care of him, who bathed him and dressed him, was there with him now, too. He could smell him close, a large shadow smiling in the darkness, near enough now to blot out the stars. The boy might have screamed then but it was not likely.