The Murder Room (51 page)

The final descent is to full-blown sadism. One becomes a sadistic killer, deriving sexual satisfaction from a complex ritual of torturing and murdering a victim. Bundy, who said pornography started him onto the path of the Helix, ended here.

The Bundy-type killer has prepared extensively for this moment. He has taken health classes so he will not contract AIDS or another illness. He becomes expert on the universal methods of saving his victim’s life—again and again—to prolong the pleasure of torture. He strangles her to within an inch of death, stops to apply Red Cross–approved mouth-to-mouth. He strangles her again, this time with ligature, a pleasure of a different shade, and moments before death revives her again with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Then it’s on to the bathroom, where he holds her head under a full tub of cool water and drowns her to within an inch of her life yet again. This is a subtly different pleasure entirely; while instructing police worldwide on the varieties of sadistic experience, Walter tells them to fill a bucket with cool water and hold a large sponge underwater with both hands, allowing themselves to feel the tingles on the small hairs along the arm, the awakening of an erogenous zone. Then they realize why so many female strangling victims are found near or in water or bathtubs—it’s not, as police commonly assume, to destroy the evidence. The water heightens the killer’s sensitivity and pleasure.

The horrors are limited only by the sadist’s imagination. The endgame, always, is sexual gratification produced by constantly exposing the victim to dominance, degradation, and dread. Walter has interviewed a few extremely lucky and rare women who survived twelve hours at the hands of a sexual sadist and somehow escaped. “They were begging to die,” he said.

Even during the torture and murder, the killer cannot expose himself emotionally to the victim. Only after he takes body parts back to his lair can he feel enough in control to open up sexually. Through more than forty victims, this was Ted Bundy’s raison d’être. His souvenir was the head. In the privacy of his home, he masturbated on the young woman’s head, then burned it in a fireplace.

When taking souvenirs doesn’t gratify anymore, the sadistic killer knows three final, descending options: necrophilia, or sex with the dead, historic vampirism—the ancient practice of blood draining, driven by sexual sadism—and finally cannibalism. Eating human flesh is the sadist’s ultimate sexual union, the ultimate intimacy without vulnerability: “I own you entirely.”

This was Jeffrey Dahmer’s final stop, the subfloor of the house of sadism. The centuries of fables about an angry man who must open his heart to love, to the vulnerability of life, or face psychological death—the tale of beauty and the beast—are not without meaning. Dahmer was simultaneously gratified and mocked by the insatiable hollowness and evil of his choice—a literal feast of death. For him, cannibalism was only the beginning. He literally could eat all he wanted, but he’d never be satisfied. “The desire is insatiable.”

The eight steps led to the abyss, the root of the myth of Dracula and the reality of Hitler, the grotesque killing forms Walter called the “ultimate nightmare.” Walter was an atheist, but despite his Christian metaphors Dante had done a fine job of portraying evil, Walter said.

The thin man went to the shelf and pulled down a beaten old copy of
The Inferno,
which he hadn’t read since college. He was intrigued to see the fourteenth-century poet had done similar work, apportioning hell into nine concentric circles, the last of which had four zones.

“The Ninth Circle of Hell is impressive,” he said. It was the lake of ice known as Cocytus, where betrayers of humanity were frozen for eternity, each encased to a different depth, from the waist down to total immersion. Walter admired the many excellent forms of vengeance portrayed, such as Count Ugolino beating the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, who had imprisoned and starved him and his children. At the center of the lake is Satan, waist-deep in ice, a huge, terrifying, winged beast with three heads. The three mouths each chew on traitors such as Brutus and Judas Iscariot. The six eyes weep tears that mix with the traitors’ blood. The six wings beat to escape but send an icy wind that further imprisons all. Judas suffers the most, his head in the mouth of Lucifer, his back forever skinned by Lucifer’s claws.

“I quite like it,” Walter said. “A little overdramatic, perhaps. But perps haven’t changed much, nor their just deserts.”

Stoud saw the photographs of the boy covering the trestle table. His studied the old police photos from 1957. Walter pointed to the cuts and bruises all over the body. He saw evidence of burning, cutting, spanking, and ligature marks. There were signs of starvation and dehydration. The anus had been sodomized, evidently with all manner of instruments. One hand and one foot were severely withered, a process caused by overexposure to water.

The burn scars on the torso showed perhaps where cigarettes had been put out. There was evidence needles had been inserted here and there. The narrow head squeezed in on the sides by some terrible pressure, probably a vise.

As soon as he saw the photographs, Walter realized that the police, led by the late Remington Bristow, had built much of four decades of investigation on the wrong premise. Bristow’s sentimental attachment to the idea the boy had been accidentally killed by loving parents was absurd.

“It’s sadism,” Walter said. “Now we see that what Mary told Kelly and McGillen in Cincinnati makes perfect sense.” Mary’s mother had an ideal setup to enjoy her exploitation of the boy, he said. The irony of being a respected librarian, working with schoolchildren on the prestigious Main Line of Philadelphia, would have excited her. It was the 1950s, when the world of suburban mothers and children was portrayed by June Cleaver standing in the kitchen in her apron saying with a frown, “I’m worried about the Beave.” And the Beaver saying, “Gee, Wally, that’s swell!”

The boy’s secluded basement prison was a perfect cover for her. Emotionally drained after her attacks, she could clean herself of blood or hair, lock the boy back down in his box, and reassume her roles in society. Neighbor. Friend. Librarian. Wife. Mother. She’d become more rigid, sadism would change her personality, but she’d handle it far below the radar, a few more Bloody Marys with her husband, a few more appearances at church.

She would have thrilled with the sense of power of dominating her secret, far different world.

“She didn’t need to cover up in front of her husband or daughter; they were thoroughly terrified of her, totally submissive,” Walter said. “Guilt was nonexistent. She was comfortable with the facts—this is who I am. While everyone else is searching for who they are, she knows the truth.”

The torture would have proceeded slowly and escalated over the months and years. “The fancy term for the cuts and bruises we see is polymorphic perverse—all over the body, equidistant, no one particular preference. Keep in mind this boy’s penis is not going to give this woman any satisfaction, what’s going to give her satisfaction, in this heaviest and most complicated of subtypes, is in the process of killing. So therefore one administers torture in a systematic way that then gets them off. Each time she’s injuring him she’s fantasizing the ultimate death, but she’s trying to maximize the experience of emasculation over time.”

She probably read to him. Hansel and Gretel would have given her pleasure. The fairy tale, stale and locked in a children’s book in the library, was one she brought to life in her own house.

The appeal of Jonathan was to snuff out a man when he was just developing. Destroying him will be the ultimate sexual pleasure, but she prolongs it by slowly degrading him. “She has him dependent, fearful, degraded, she’s created an image of him and now she’s trying to destroy the image, and he just becomes a prop. Everything that went wrong in her own life, she had a wonderful whipping boy.”

The narrow misshapen head indicates “she did a lot of head pressure, squeezing his head real tight with hands or implements or a vise, keeping him immobile in a head harness. She probably had a fair amount of bondage, tying up, whipping him, taking him out of the box, someplace where he was unseen. She had sex with him. She’s getting off as she’s doing this.”

She despises him for his innocence, youth, and his failure. “He’s likely retarded, has surgical scars from his first year of life so he’s damaged goods. He was told by his parents, he’s trash, a throw-away child. She knew what she wanted. She knew she needed a sex toy, and instead of choosing a dildo or a plastic doll, which they didn’t have then, she could have a real live one and it didn’t make any difference. Now you see how they view other people. Other people simply don’t exist.”

When the nightmarish headlines begin about the Boy in the Box, she follows it closely, getting high from it. At the library and in church she says, “Isn’t it terrible about that boy?” Her power feels ever more expansive; she is aggressing not only against the boy but the police department, the entire community of Philadelphia, and the Main Line especially.

By the time of the boy’s death, Mary’s mother had moved deep into the Helix and was on the high cusp of bondage and discipline. “He’s bonded in the basement, chained down, secured in that box.” Advancement down the scale is unpredictable; it can take weeks, years, or mere hours. The puncture scars on Jonathan’s body indicate that the next phase was starting—picquerism—when suddenly on an afternoon in 1957 the mother became a murderer. It was clear to Walter that the mother, having teased out her pleasure over years and then suddenly discovered the exhilarating rush of killing, “would have chosen another victim in short order, and dispatched him much more quickly.”

The Main Line librarian, he believes, was a serial killer in the making.

The hatred of innocence continued unabated, of that there is powerful evidence. Shortly before her death, the aging mother asked her daughter, now a young woman, if she could share her bed sexually one more time. The daughter refused, engendering rage from the old woman.

“So the mother was the perfect killer,” Walter said. “There’s only one problem with this scenario.” He took a long draw on a Kool
.

“She didn’t do it.”

He smiled coolly in the gloom of the parlor.

“But I know who did.”

L
ate one Sunday night, the week before Christmas 2004, Walter was drinking wine and watching ultimate fighting on cable when he received a call from the police department in Hudson, Wisconsin (population 8,775), a small town on the St. Croix River west of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Was it too late to call? The officer sounded nervous.

“Not to worry,” Walter said.

“Erickson is dead.”

“You’re
kidding
me.”

“They found him at the church.”

Walter listened quietly. He had visited Hudson two weeks ago to consult with the police on the biggest cold case in the small town’s history—the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home nearly three years earlier.

On February 5, 2002, funeral director Dan O’Connell, thirty-nine, one of the town’s leading citizens, and his assistant, college intern James Ellison, twenty-two, were found shot to death in the funeral home in broad daylight. The police were astounded. It was as unthinkable as a spaceship landing in the river and little green men swimming ashore. In Hudson, folks only saw such things on TV, or read about them in the city newspaper.

The victims were respected people with no known enemies who hadn’t engaged in any risky behavior, such as drug dealing, that could have set them up for murder. O’Connell was one of Hudson’s most prominent businessmen, a leader of the Catholic Church, a paramedic, and active in the Rotary Club, the Boy Scouts, and YMCA fund-raisers. He had been named King of the North Hudson Pepper Fest. Ellison was an upstanding young man with few local ties. There was no robbery, no motive for the double murder in the quiet small town.

As the police struggled to find suspects, O’Connell’s sister, Kathleen, heard from a friend about the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia. The local
Star Tribune,
in Minneapolis, said they were a group of “volunteer super sleuths” and “cold-case cowboys” who tackled murders that “stymied local law enforcement across the nation” and solved 80 percent of them. Willing to “grab on to anything for answers,” Kathleen O’Connell e-mailed the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, pleading for help. She received a formal reply that, out of respect for local police, the society would not consider a murder case until it was at least two years old. On the second anniversary of the slaying, with the Hudson police still thwarted, she wrote again, and was approved. “The Murder of Daniel O’Connell and James Ellison” went on the Vidocq docket as Case No. 133. The society paid for Hudson lieutenant Paul Larson to present the case in the Downtown Club over lunch on April 15, 2004. The case “had Richard’s name all over it,” Fleisher said, and indeed Walter took an immediate interest and flew out to Hudson to assist.

Fleisher was convinced the case had attracted a strong collective commitment, the passionate heat “absolutely required” to solve a cold murder. “There’s a family very interested in their loved one’s case, a police department willing to go that extra distance, a prosecutor who’s willing to cooperate to get the job done, and the media willing to pay attention to the case,” he said. “You need all of it to get the job done.”

The famous profiler from Philadelphia arriving in Hudson was front-page news in the weekly
Hudson Gazette.
Walter was pictured grinning and standing alongside the young cops he quickly took under his wing. He used the story to plant seeds of doubt in the suspect. “We know more than the killer thinks we do,” he said, employing one of his favorite lines. “If I were him, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”