The Skeleton Crew (15 page)

After leaning over a computer screen for what felt like hours, we stood up and ventured out of Betty's study. “Whatcha doin', bubba?” Betty cooed to her son, placid after his after-school nap. Jonas has pin-straight blond hair, a captivating smile, and the round face and wide-set, almond eyes of a child with Down syndrome. “He's ornery,” Betty confided affectionately. Where in the world, I wondered, could Jonas possibly have picked up that trait? Being ornery is a necessity for many parents of atypical children. Some days, advocating for Jonas took its toll on Betty. “I worry every day about my little one and how people have treated him in this world,” she once wrote. “I try to not let it bother me but . . . I wish people saw
Jonas for the fun, lovely child he is . . . So disappointed in life and people at times.” But with her son, she's upbeat. “He's my little man,” she said, ruffling his hair. Betty's husband, Joe, smiled and shrugged when I asked him about Betty's web sleuthing. “It's her thing,” he said. “You help me out once in a while,” Betty interjected and then turned to me. “I'll ask him: ‘Does this guy look like that guy?'” Joe didn't disagree, but it was clear from his resigned manner he wasn't a die-hard fan of Betty's hobby.

It had gotten late. I told Betty dinner was on me; I offered to take the whole family out, but Joe stayed behind, sunk into a plush beige recliner with Jonas sprawled on his lap. We drove to a bar and grill in a strip mall where beefy, tattooed men perched at high-tops, drank beer, and watched the game on TV. Betty and I settled in a booth. The waitress called us “girls.” Betty laughed when the high-octane margarita I was served in a plastic tumbler made me toss my head back and forth like a horse shaking off a fly.

On the way back to her house, we cruised Betty's neighborhood in her husband's silver Dodge Ram. High-voltage power poles in the distance towered above rolling, grassy hills like monstrous Erector set men. The development was so new, houses were still emerging from bare lots. Betty pointed to an architectural detail she liked on someone else's house, but the structures all looked the same to me: white or beige clapboard with pitched roofs, porches, and black shutters. They had backyards and central air and cathedral-ceiling living rooms, the American dream for $350,000, around a third of what the same kind of house would go for in Boston or San Francisco. Betty Brown had a lovely home, a beautiful boy, and a husband she was crazy about, but her life wasn't perfect—no one's ever is.

Back on her street she waved to a man loading something into a pickup. “That's my father-in-law,” she said, and sighed about how Joe's parents, who moved to Winston-Salem at the same time as Joe and herself, didn't seem inclined to socialize. “In this neighborhood, if you're not born and raised here, you're an outsider,” she said.

It struck me that Betty Brown's intense spell of web sleuthing coincided with Jonas's birth and her move from Virginia to North Carolina. It must have been a stressful time: the challenges of a late-in-life baby; moving to a new state with a new husband and new in-laws; leaving behind
her siblings—whom she had described to me as her best friends—and her grown children.

The Internet may have helped Betty escape to a different world, one in which she wielded power and control. “Making an identification—that's power,” Todd Matthews pointed out to me one day. “You just changed something. You changed an unknown person into a homicide investigation.” The local paper calls, you do a story, a family is appreciative, and for a while you're a hero. Then the hubbub dies down and you're back where you started, dealing with your own potentially troublesome life.

As Betty said, to find out where someone ended up, you need to find out where they started. “For our family, I know how long it took me to search and research and get as far as I have,” she told me.

I was beginning to see how Betty Dalton Brown had ended up where she did.

8

SEEKERS OF LOST SOULS

T
aking a break from the Tent Girl case, I was idly searching through archives when I came across an old newspaper article about the Lady of the Dunes with a byline I recognized: George Liles.

I had worked with Liles,
an amiable fireplug of a guy with basset hound eyes, at Tufts University, where I wrote about people, events, and research before I left to accept a science writing job at MIT. Liles and I had both started our careers as newspaper reporters covering selectmen's meetings that droned on about granite versus asphalt curbs and other mind-numbing small-town minutiae. Pre-Internet, reporters typically moved from the town government beat to the crime beat, where you paid a daily visit to the police station to chat up the cops, hoping they'd drop a newsworthy tidbit. If you're on the crime beat for more than a year or two you're considered a lifer, prone to becoming a cynical connoisseur of human misery and deviance. Neither George nor I had succumbed to that fate, but I knew George knew his way around an old-fashioned police log.

The byline on the article I'd found showed that in 1995, twenty-one years after the Lady of the Dunes was murdered, Liles was doing a stint at the
Provincetown Banner
. On a slow news day, he had ambled over to the station to see what was happening with the decades-old unsolved case.

He was ushered in to see tall, stocky Provincetown sergeant Warren Tobias, who struck Liles as an old-school gumshoe right out of a Dashiell
Hammett paperback. To Liles's surprise, Tobias was working on a lead and willing to share. Tobias said he believed the Lady of the Dunes was an alleged drug runner and gun smuggler named Rory Gene Kesinger, who had escaped from jail in 1973, the year before the body in the dunes was found, and vanished. Liles's story had legs, as they say in the news business. Tobias's speculation about Kesinger would appear in coverage about the case until 2002, when
a DNA test showed definitively
she was not the victim in the dunes.

Now a veteran newsman and science writer, Liles helps undergrads from around the country hone their writing skills as part of a summer program at the preeminent Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod. A few weeks before he and I spoke, he kicked off the seminar as he always does, by showing the students examples of his own published pieces, including the one about the Lady of the Dunes.

Under a photo of a grave marker, the headline on Liles's 1995 story read, “Is There a Killer Among Us?”

Liles told me that the headline always jarred the college students into looking up from their laptops and cell phones. They all wanted to know if the murderer had ever been found, and were surprised to hear the victim was still nameless.

Liles held that the Lady of the Dunes manifested a new twist on high-profile cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and reports of the survival of Anastasia, a daughter of Czar Nicholas II. Instead of a famous victim, the victim was unknown, yet the case had the same aura of intrigue as historically notorious mysteries.

Then there was the matter of her missing hands. Going to the trouble of hacking off and disposing of hands suggested the killer didn't want her to be identified by her fingerprints. But in the 1970s, processing ten-print fingerprint submissions was a manual, labor-intensive task, and only federal employees and lawbreakers would have been certain to have fingerprints on file, Liles argued. Was she a fed or a criminal?

Liles asked me if I had been to the dunes. It's an eerie place, otherworldly, he reminded me. Just a short walk away from Provincetown, this civilized little town, the dunes can feel like a different planet. The fact that the victim was found in the dunes added to her allure.

“The ‘Lady on the Sidewalk' just wouldn't have the same ring to it,” he
said, and I laughed. I thought Liles was right: circumstances conspired to capture the public's imagination on this case while others languished in obscurity. Still, if I was ever going to get my feet wet as a web sleuth, it might not hurt to start with a high-profile case.

During a trip to North Carolina, I quizzed
Daphne Owings, the most prolific
web sleuth I'd encountered, on tips for how to go about sleuthing out the Lady of the Dunes's identity. In 2002, Daphne, a mother of two, had become engrossed in Sue Grafton's
Q Is for Quarry
, a crime thriller based loosely on the Santa Barbara, California, sheriff's investigation into Jane Doe 1969, a stabbing victim discovered near a quarry on Highway 1, south of the working-class city of Lompoc. Grafton herself helped pay for the body to be exhumed, which led to a facial reconstruction. Daphne became fascinated by the image of the bucktoothed, brown-haired young woman. When Daphne's husband was sent to serve in Iraq, she started volunteering for the Doe Network to take her mind off the war. Daphne is blond, athletic, and sharp, and I quickly saw that besides the fact that I'd never catch up with her in a road race, my visual memory was no match for hers. She had the extraordinary ability to look at morgue photos and facial reconstructions and then scrutinize missing-person files until a spark of recognition, as she put it, struck her.

Daphne pointed out that, given the extensive media coverage of the Lady of the Dunes, it was quite likely she was not in a database anywhere or she would have been matched already. Instead of going to the usual websites, she advised, plug in “missing woman,” “missing girl,” and “Massachusetts” in newspaper archives and genealogy databases. Ignore the hair on the reconstructions, which might not be depicted in an accurate color or style, and look at the basic facial shape, the line of the nose, the width between the eyes. Start hammering away at missing persons who fall within the age range and range of time: Look first at people who went missing in 1974, backtrack a few years, and work with those, she said. If I came up empty-handed, I could look for people who went missing earlier; who were
younger or older, shorter or taller; who had blue eyes instead of brown. It was easy for errors to creep into the online data.

Daphne was not exaggerating when she called it work. This was hard. What's more, she eschews relatively high-profile cases such as the Lady of the Dunes on principle. Owings said she never opted to spend any time on her case because so many others likely had. She prefers cases that haven't garnered a lot of attention: they're the ones that need it.

In 1995, my friend George Liles was one of many reporters who had written about the Lady of the Dunes. That same year, in Kentucky, almost no one was actively following the case of Tent Girl besides Todd Matthews, by then
a twenty-five-year-old night shift worker
in an auto parts factory.

Over and over, Todd mentally rearranged the meager facts about Tent Girl, like the squares on a recalcitrant Rubik's cube, in a fruitless effort to force them into place.

If Tent Girl was a teenager, as he read in the newspapers, Todd figured someone must have filed a missing-person report. When he didn't find one, he convinced himself that the only reason Tent Girl's parents weren't looking for her was because they had a hand in her disappearance. These murderous parents lurking in Kentucky horrified him until he remembered they likely existed only in his imagination.

The one thing Todd couldn't seem to do was forget about the case. One harrowing incident captured what lack of closure can do to you.

It was 1995. Todd lived with twenty-four-year-old Lori in a single-wide trailer adjacent to his parents' home.

As he did every day, he yanked black curtains over the trailer's tiny bedroom window to help himself sleep, but white-hot sunlight still crept in around the edges. He pulled the bedspread over his eyes, trying to pretend that the world outside was dark and still. It was only Wednesday—two more all-night shifts at the Hutchinson plant before the weekend.

For eight years, he'd been chasing the ice-cold trail of a girl dead almost three decades. He never imagined himself as a private detective, let alone an amateur one. As a kid, he'd spent so much time in hospitals for a con
genital heart condition that he figured he might have picked up enough medicalese to become a doctor. With a bum heart, he couldn't quarry limestone like his grandfather, and he didn't have his father's knack for fixing machines and driving trucks. But, married at eighteen and a father at twenty-two, Todd had a family to support.

After bagging groceries at Brown's Galaxy Market his junior year in high school and working as a bundle boy in a garment factory, Todd now commuted less than a mile to Hutchinson Worldwide, a global conglomerate that owns manufacturing facilities in Livingston. Inside a large, windowless rectangular building he plucked pieces of stainless steel off an assembly line and inserted them in a machine called a bender. The metal was curved into a cylinder, then he and high school buddy Wayne Sells fitted O-rings onto it, capped it, labeled it, and packed it on its way to automobile factories for use in air-conditioning and engine cooling systems.

Sells invited Todd to hear his bluegrass band, but Todd was always tracking down some lead on a dead girl. Sells had never heard of such a thing. For one, it seemed impossible. And it didn't seem like fun.

Todd's night-owl schedule meant he was often alone with time on his hands to think about Tent Girl and how she had most likely been murdered and that her murderer was still at large, maybe even in Tennessee. Loneliness spilled over into depression. He feared he was losing his grip on reality. Looking back, he wouldn't say he went crazy, exactly, but he knew he wasn't pursuing healthy patterns. He never got enough sleep. Dark seemed darker, he knew, when your mind isn't the way it should be.

One morning, he was startled to see a half-empty glass of juice on the kitchen counter that hadn't been there when he had gone to bed. He didn't recall waking, walking to the kitchen, pouring and drinking the juice. Another time he'd awoken and found himself standing completely upright, propped against a cabinet in the bathroom with a book in his hand. These incidents set him on edge for days. Was he capable of lighting an oil lamp while he slept and setting the entire trailer on fire?

If you asked him if he believed in ghosts, he might say that ghosts were crazy talk. Other times, the God's honest truth was he wasn't sure. Todd once spent a night in a city park in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghost. The story goes that a young woman arrived at
the now-defunct Graham Springs Hotel in the mid-1800s and signed the register with a fictitious name. The woman danced madly the entire night and finally collapsed, dead, on the ballroom floor. She was buried in an anonymous grave on grounds that became a park. Todd didn't cross paths that night with the Lady Who Danced Herself to Death, but if trying to see her meant he was crazy, so be it; he wasn't ashamed. Maybe, he said a tad defensively, there's a separate, unseen world out there that we only catch glimpses of.

In the state between wakefulness and sleep, the outside world felt removed, unreal. Todd had to shut down his morbidly swirling thoughts if he was going to get to sleep. He was, as usual, exhausted. The doctor had given him a prescription for the sleeping pill Ambien. He thought of the vial in the medicine cabinet but later swore he did not take any that day. He had just succumbed to a blissful blankness when he heard a sound. This was not unusual. Some days he was awakened by scratching, banging, rattling—­sounds difficult to ignore.

Members of Todd's family had had ghostly encounters before. His mother once heard a cooking pan clatter to the floor in the middle of the night. The pan rolled on its rim before finally settling with a clank of metal on wood. She got up to pick it up only to find it safely on its hook. Even Lori once insisted that an entire second-floor landing had crashed in—but nothing turned out to be out of place. Right before Todd's grandmother died, she accused Papa Vaughn of playing tricks on her when she discerned guitar music coming from the next room. But even though Tom Vaughn was known for the occasional practical joke, that wasn't one of them.

Todd heard a thump. Like a driver in a slow-motion car wreck, he felt himself propelled through space. He threw off the sheets and stumbled from the bedroom into the adjacent combined kitchen and living room.

She was there in the kitchen. He was not at all surprised to see her. The trailer's small windows were covered in a vain attempt to simulate night, but he made out the shape of a head and shoulders. Awkwardly confined by the grayish green canvas bag, she nevertheless seemed able to move about the cramped room.

He imagined himself, like her, closed up in a tarp, struggling to breathe. It was almost as if he were inside her head. He could feel her fear.

The first thing he asked her was what he most wanted to know:
Who are you?
He sensed her reproach. He should know who she was, if he truly wanted to help her. Well, then she would have to reveal herself. The next thing he knew, the bag was lying on the couch and he was leaning over it, a butcher knife in his hand. He heard a blade sawing through fabric, the way Riddle's must have when he cut open her shroud. Todd struggled to penetrate the tough fabric, finally carving a slit, an opening that he hoped would free whatever was inside from the horror in which it was trapped.

As soon as the opening was big enough, something flew out toward him. What was left of her face, streaked black and brown with decay, burst through the hole. Her short reddish hair was mussed and plastered to her scalp. The eyes were gone; the right side of her face eaten away, exposing her white, straight teeth to the roots. Her lipless mouth looked huge, the teeth bared in a horrific grin.

A few years later, in 1998, a newspaper reporter would come to interview Todd. They stood together in the brand-new double-wide that had replaced the single-wide trailer. The reporter shuffled through a sheaf of paper, pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph, and offered it to Todd. Todd looked down at the photo in his hand.