The Murder Room (53 page)

Jan felt a warmth coursing through her body. “It’s not like a bolt of lightning. It’s soft,” she said.

Within days, the pain began to fade. Jan rose from bed and returned to work. Six weeks later, test after test confirmed the inexplicable: She was completely clear of cancer. Doctors were baffled; the local NBC station reported the “medical miracle.” The Benders were awed. Jan wept with joy with Frank; she believed his devotion to her and to his work with Saint John Neumann had saved her. Father Moley said, “Maybe Saint John Neumann wanted this intercession as a gift” to the artist for his magnificent work. Fleisher jubilantly shared the news with the Vidocq Society.

Walter, ever skeptical, didn’t believe it. He saw Bender talking about his wife’s illness in a firestorm of publicity. It didn’t work for him. It didn’t seem right.

R
ichard Walter, the thin man in black tie, was nearing the end of a Chardonnay and his patience, listening to a society woman prattle on about this and that. The Pen Ryn mansion, 250 years old, glowed with yellow light on the west bank of the Delaware River, America’s first mansion row. Music and laughter floated out into the darkness over the broad lawn down to the river. Ladies were greeted by a string quartet, a flute of champagne, and a rose from a smiling federal agent who specialized in busting drug lords. Men had tucked Berettas and Glocks into the jackets and pants of tuxedos; women swapped DNA and blood sample kits for gowns and pearls.

Suddenly without a word Walter pirouetted and walked away from the woman, the back of his starched-proper figure disappearing swiftly into the crowd. She flapped her mouth open and closed like a magnificent egret.

“My God! He walked away right in the middle of my sentence!”

“Oh, it’s OK,” said the woman standing next to her. “He does that to everyone.”

No ball was quite like it: the Vidocq Society annual black-tie fête, event of the year for men and women dressed to kill.

“Where else can you see Frank Bender in a tux?” asked Bill Fleisher, magnificent in black tie with the bronze Vidocq medal around his neck on the tricolor ribbon. He raised a glass of champagne, toasting Bender’s remarkable identification of Colorado Jane Doe, fifty-five years after the young woman’s corpse was discovered by hikers in a Boulder canyon in 1954. The Vidocq Society’s latest triumph had unearthed another possible victim of Los Angeles’s “Lonely Hearts Killer” Harvey Glatman. Fleisher impulsively grabbed Bender and gave him a hug.

Walter stood to the side, frowning at the public display of affection. In his classic tuxedo, Walter looked like a gaunt double for Holmes in the original Sidney Paget illustrations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in
The Strand
magazine in the 1890s. But no one had the courage to tell him.

The round tables in the great hall were crowded with detectives from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East on this Sunday in October 2009. Bottles of wine and sprays of alstroemeria lilies had replaced crime-scene photos and autopsy reports de rigueur the rest of the year. This one night of the year, the Murder Room, a portable feast, was decorated for butter, not guns, for celebration and sheer joy.

Commissioner Fleisher prepared for the event as if for a State of the Union address. After the prime rib and salmon, the cake and the coffee, and as the wine and whiskey made extra rounds, Fleisher would emcee the awards ceremony for the coveted Vidocq Society Medal of Honor. The ball was the moment to take stock; a chance to look back and ahead. For nearly twenty years now Fleisher had done so with pride, excitement, and keen anticipation of what was to come. He had watched the society grow from a social luncheon club for detectives to a crime-fighting organization with a global reach.

The Vidocq Society family had grown from three men at lunch to 82 full members, one for each year of E. F. Vidocq’s life, to more than 150 total members, including associates. They had investigated more than 300 unsolved murders, solving 90 percent, offering advice and counsel and the name of the killer. There were more tangible results: arrests, convictions, and depression, and perhaps suicide prevented among families haunted by murder. Truth was their client. It was Aeschylus who said the words of truth are simple, and so it was with the Vidocq Society’s achievements: the lost found, the nameless named, the guilty punished, the innocent set free. VSMs were helpmates to the living, heroes to the dead.

Fleisher, Bender, and Walter sat separately at the round tables, honoring the democratic fellowship. But even the casual views of them standing together in the great hall, draped in the bronze relief medals of E. F. Vidocq cast by Bender, their own Medals of Honor for meritorious service, were powerful affirmations of their unique partnership, the heart of the Vidocq family.

It was a family that kept growing. Jim Dunn, now a tricolor-pinned VSM, shared news that he said was “music to my ears”—his son’s killer was denied parole until 2013. Walter said in a letter to the Texas Parole Board that by refusing to reveal what happened to Scott’s body, Leisha Hamilton showed that “for her . . . the murder is not over!” She was an unrepentant psychopath with an “insatiable desire for stimulation and conquest” who would seek new victims: “If and when [Hamilton] is reviewed again for release, it is suggested that you re-read this letter.”

Dunn and Walter would continue to battle to keep her in prison the full twenty years, until 2017. But time and Dunn’s wife were steering him toward Walter’s wisdom that a man lets the fires of fury and righteousness burn down.

Walter’s wisdom was for others. He burned with the desire to put away a third killer of Scott Dunn who had “flown beneath the radar all these years.”

“I reminded Jim I’m a graduate of the Evelyn Woods School of Revenge. I’m in this for the long haul.”

It was a night for stories, family stories. Walter was full of them. He had received a strange package from a man in New Jersey some years ago, Mike Rodelli, who claimed to have solved the most famous unsolved serial killer case in modern American history. He’d learned the name of the Zodiac Killer, the unknown assailant who had killed five Californians in 1968 and 1969, taunting the police with letters and cryptograms. Walter had been skeptical, but he’d worked with the amateur sleuth for years, coaching him, and now he was convinced the man was right—the Zodiac Killer was still alive, an elderly and quite wealthy man in California, still living off the pleasure of his iconic murders. Few doubted Walter. He’d also worked for years with another amateur investigator, Ohio trucker Robert Mancini, whom Walter believed had finally cracked the case that Eliot Ness couldn’t. Years after the Vidocq Society studied the case, Mancini had identified the Butcher of Cleveland. The killer was a long-dead sexual sadist who’d worked for the railroads. Justice was a different matter in both cases; justice always was.

“Did I tell you about the time I killed a prosecutor?” Walter asked. He had gone to Oklahoma on a Vidocq Society case to confront the state attorney on a double murder the prosecutor refused to investigate for political reasons, and demanded he file murder charges. The prosecutor told him, “Screw yourself and leave the state.” Walter replied, “I could go through you as easily as around you, but I’d prefer to give you a chance to grow wiser. I will call you three days after Thanksgiving, and if you have not changed your mind, you and I will have a man-to-boy chat.” The prosecutor died of a heart attack before Thanksgiving. “Good!” Walter told the prosecutor’s office. “Whom do I have to deal with next?” Fleisher called the governor of Oklahoma, a friend of his, and the result was “an extremely cooperative new prosecutor,” Walter said. “We solved the case.”

Walter was nearly seventy years old and suffered winter ailments now of greater duration. But he hadn’t slowed down.

“Did I tell you about the time I killed a priest?” Walter asked.

The solving of the double murder in Hudson, Wisconsin, had become one of his favorite stories. After the suicide of Catholic priest Ryan Erickson, whom Walter had named as the prime suspect, the police had taken the profiler’s unusual advice to try to establish the dead cleric’s guilt in court. In a remarkable October 2005 “John Doe” hearing, St. Croix County circuit judge Eric Lundell determined the priest had committed the double murder to avoid exposure as a pedophile. The priest’s lawyer refused to attend, maintaining his deceased client’s innocence. There was no jury.

The prosecution presented fifteen witnesses
.
A young man testified that Father Ryan served him alcohol and sexually assaulted him repeatedly as a teenager in 2000 and 2001. An eyewitness described a car similar to Erickson’s parked outside the funeral home at the time of the killings. Detectives testified that Erickson knew crime scene details only the killer would know, such as how many bullets were fired into the victims (three) and where they struck (in the head). A church deacon testified that Erickson confessed the killings to him. Erickson was looking out a window when he blurted out, “I done it, and they’re going to get me. . . . Do you know what they do with young guys in prison, especially priests?”

Judge Lundell wrote, “I conclude that Ryan Erickson probably committed the crimes in question. On a scale of one to ten, I would consider it a ten.” The Vidocq Society awarded the Medal of Honor to several members of the Hudson Police Department for solving the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home.

Fleisher was especially proud of their work on the tragic case of Marie Noe, convicted of killing eight of her babies. Three months after her arrest, Marie Noe, then seventy years old and walking into the courtroom with a cane, pleaded guilty in June 1999 to smothering eight of her ten children beginning in 1949. The case drew national attention, forcing police and medical professionals to rethink many cases long believed to be sudden infant death syndrome or “crib death” as possible murders.

Marie’s husband, Arthur, sat shaking his head as the names of the eight children were read aloud, and the prosecutor described his wife as “as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy.”

Noe’s lawyer, David Rudenstein, said Marie did not have “the heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that make us human. Some things happen in life that we cannot understand.”

The court treated Marie more like a sad old mother than a psychopathic killer. She would serve no jail time for mass murder. By the conditions of her plea bargain, which took into account Arthur’s frail health, she was given twenty years of probation, the first five under home confinement, with at least a year with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. She was also ordered to undergo treatment sessions with a psychiatrist; her brain was said to be important to study for clues to the root causes of infanticide. Marie told detectives, “All I can figure is that I’m ungodly sick.”

The Vidocq Society had awarded Medals of Honor to
Philadelphia
magazine writer Stephen Fried and Philadelphia homicide Sergeant Larry Nodiff for their work on the Noe case.

Even amid celebration, Fleisher had regrets. “I’m Jewish,” he said. “I always have regrets.”

Near the top of the list was Carol Ann Dougherty, the nine-year-old raped and murdered in a church in 1962. The Bristol police investigation had gone nowhere. DNA testing advised by the Vidocq Society was “inconclusive.” In 1997, Chief Frank Peranteau told the Vidocq Society that “he considers the matter over as the Grand Jury had identified a possible suspect who has been convicted of another murder in another state,” O’Kane wrote in the Vidocq case log. “The investigation appeared to clear the suspect priest, but he could not explain the ligature,” the strangulation marks that matched a priest’s cincture. No arrests were made.

But thirteen years after the Vidocq Society called the priest the prime suspect, a Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 named Father Sabadish one of sixty-three pedophile priests that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had allowed to prey on their flocks in the past fifty years. The archdiocese was accused of routinely transferring molesters to keep hundreds of abuse allegations from surfacing.

Joan McCrane testified to the grand jury that Sabadish molested her when she was seven years old in 1960, two years before Carol was murdered, at St. Michael the Archangel in Levittown. It started with “tickling,” she said. “He’d put his hands on my shoulders. Then, on my chest. Then, down my pants. . . . He told me that it was our secret and that I was never to tell anyone or we’d both go to hell. I never said anything because I was a little girl and I was scared to death.”

Transferred to St. Mark’s in 1962, Sabadish molested her for two more years, then started abusing her ten-year-old brother, Bill Henis. Sabadish’s assaults on the siblings occurred at the rectories at St. Mark’s and St. Michael’s, the priest’s home, his car, and his mother’s home, often weekly.

“I hated the guy and I was afraid of him,” Henis said. “He didn’t like kids. He’d slap you around, call you stupid. You never knew what would set him off. . . . Sabadish said this is how he showed his love for me. He’d always give me candy. The glove compartment of his car was always filled with it. He’d tell me candy fairies had put it there.”

Sabadish didn’t live to see his secret exposed. After serving as chaplain of the Norristown church, he was appointed in 1994 to the fifteenth parish of his career, as the parochial vicar of St. Stanislaus in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, before retiring. He died in 1999 at the age of eighty-one. He was eulogized by another priest as a man who “touched countless souls, especially those of children.”

Fleisher remained confident the VSMs were right, and the police had missed it. “It was the priest all along,” he said. “The guy was a monster.”

Forty-seven years after her murder, the Carol Ann Dougherty murder case remained cold.

As the great hall filled, a crowd formed around Bender. The sculptor was, as he often had been, the man of the moment. His ID of Colorado Jane Doe, which would make national news, helped crack the oldest case the Vidocq Society had ever worked on in the field.