The Skeleton Crew (23 page)

The state had granted Julie Miller immunity in 2002. In exchange, she agreed to testify against DeBruin. Just before the trial in 2005, Kies and Kivi decided to talk to Miller one last time, expecting a routine pretrial interview between prosecutors and witness. To their surprise, Miller changed her story yet again. The scene she described shocked and horrified them.

In a crowded courtroom a few days later, Miller, wearing a prim blouse and her oversized glasses, said that in January 2001, DeBruin covered the basement laundry room with plastic sheets. Later, up in the kitchen, he asked May to check out a tattoo of a wolf DeBruin was doing on Miller's back. As May sat, bent over Julie, DeBruin snuck up behind him, slipped a yellow cord around his neck, and pulled it tight. Moose—six-four, 250 pounds—and Miller—five-three, 110 pounds—staggered down the stairs with May's six-foot frame supported between them. (The slamming Jan heard may have been May's corpse thudding down the stairs.) The pair dragged May's body to the basement.

DeBruin's version was somewhat different. In the courtroom, he was barely recognizable as the burly ex-con who used to be seen around town
with Greg May. Clean-shaven, his graying hair combed back neatly, he wore glasses and a suit that made him look like a kindly fifty-something businessman. He testified that on January 11, 2001, he was smoking in the basement. He heard odd sounds coming from upstairs. “Then [Miller] came downstairs mad, slobbering, mumbling and making no sense,” said DeBruin. After climbing the stairs to the kitchen, he noticed a large kitchen knife and rag, and saw May slumped over the table. He had blood on his chest. DeBruin felt his neck for a pulse, he sobbed from the witness stand. Miller had stabbed May in the chest as he sat at the kitchen table, DeBruin said. He laid May on the floor, went back downstairs, and vomited. “He's my best friend,” he said. “I didn't want to do what she said.”

Nevertheless, Miller and DeBruin both testified that the next morning they drove together to a Lowe's in Dubuque and bought concrete and an electric chain saw.

When they arrived back at the house, they went to work.

After placing May's body on a washing machine, they sawed off his head over a utility sink. Blood flowed down the drain. DeBruin used the chain saw to dismember the rest of the body. Miller used a kitchen knife. They sliced off the feet and hands, severed the legs above and below the knees. They tucked the pieces in black plastic bags and secured the bags with tape.

They mixed cement and water in one of the five-gallon plastic buckets that the friends had used when they had gone fishing together. DeBruin encased May's severed head in a stocking cap and plunged it into the bucket. They piled the body parts into DeBruin's Volvo and drove toward Dubuque, pitching sections of limbs over the edge of US 52 into a steep ravine south of the city across from a housing development. They wrapped May's torso in plastic and tied weights to it before dropping it off the Mississippi River bridge between Sabula, Iowa, and Savanna, Illinois.

DeBruin and Miller left the chain saw and some of May's clothes at a Goodwill collection site in Dubuque. They ditched the Volvo at a Bellevue auto body shop. Miller testified that she drove May's car from Bellevue to Dubuque and finally abandoned it in Aurora, Illinois, where investigators found it with May's wallet and keys on the front seat.

A few days after packing May's collection and the bucket containing his
head into the truck, they drove north to Missouri and pulled into a truck stop in Kearney to spend the night.

The truck stop was on the west side of the interstate. Under the highway and across a set of railroad tracks you can find the Mount Olivet Cemetery, where Jesse James is buried. From where the bucket sat, you could practically see the outlaw's grave, Jesse James fan Gary Chilcote told me.

Was it a coincidence that the pair stopped in Kearney? Investigators found a weigh-station receipt in the Ryder truck. The bucket may have been ditched in Kearney only to lighten the truck, which was laden down with May's Civil War collection. Others believed the location was deliberate. Chilcote told me that at the trial Julie Miller insinuated that leaving May's head there was the ultimate insult: the pair decided that Greg May loved Jesse James so much, they'd leave May's head where he could “keep an eye” on James's grave.

On April 21, 2005, the jury took an hour to declare DeBruin guilty of the murder of Greg May.

Contradictions between Miller's testimony at DeBruin's trial and her prior testimony in the stolen property case led the state to indict her for perjury. Miller pleaded guilty, and the district court judge sentenced her to a maximum term of sixty months.

Miller's former pastor testified that she was a person of good character who deserved a break because she had been abused as a child. A divorced mother of three, “Julie has never had a traffic ticket,” Julie's mother, Mary Klar, told the
Inter-County Leader
. “She's a gentle and good person.”

More than a decade after Jan Buman saw Greg May for the last time and kissed him good-bye outside his Bellevue home, she remembered him as “the best boyfriend” she had ever had. A tattoo of an eagle that May had started for her remains unfinished. Greg himself never got more tattoos than the two on his shoulders because he couldn't take the pain, Don May ruefully explained to me.

“Greg May ruled!!!” a Chicago aficionado who had bought an antique tattoo machine from May in 1994 posted as part of an online tribute to
May. Another tattoo buff uploaded a flash design May had designed and inked years ago on a friend's bicep. Hand-drawn on paper, flash is displayed on the walls of tattoo parlors and in binders to show walk-in customers. Artists painstakingly draw and hand-paint the flash of their original designs using unforgiving watercolors. It can take months of work to paint enough flash to fill an average tattoo shop, and Don May recalled, when he was a small child, his father painting his flash long into the night after working all day in his shop. “He was a very hard worker, my dad.”

The tattoo posted on the forum was of the head of a panther, fangs bared, nostrils and tongue bloodred, eyes orange and fierce, black fur slick and shiny. The lines are clean and bold; the head looks vaguely classical, as though May had been influenced by the ancient Greeks. Below the design are the words “by Greg.” The cursive capital
G
is finished with a fanciful curlicue; the
e
mimics a curvy number three. Out of deference to his father, a successful businessman who wasn't thrilled with his son's choice of profession, May never signed his creations with his last name. The finely wrought details of the panther are proof enough of his skill, recognizable as May's work by those in the know.

DeBruin was sentenced to life without parole. He claimed to spend sleepless nights wishing that someone would shoot him and put him out of his misery, gazing at the tattoos on his body, tattoos the man he had described as his best and only friend had once meticulously inked.

The sparse remains of Greg May were buried in a tiny casket in Des Plaines, Illinois. Don May didn't buy Miller and DeBruin's story about dropping the torso off a bridge. Checking meteorological records, Don saw there was a layer of ice up to eight inches thick on the Mississippi that January.

Don's theory is that his father was shot, not strangled, and that the torso would have provided evidence of a bullet, potentially traceable to both DeBruin and Miller. But May's torso has never been recovered. Perhaps a case for the web sleuths, I suggested. “That's true,” Don mused. “It could be out there listed on a website somewhere.”

Miller completed a five-year sentence for perjury and was released from federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, in 2011. She has never been charged in connection with May's murder, a fact that Don May finds unconscionable. He has vowed to find a way to put Julie Miller back behind bars. Inspired by the case, the Iowa legislature passed a law that makes it a felony to “mutilate, disfigure, dismember, hide, or bury a human corpse with the intent to commit a crime.”

After DeBruin's conviction, Ellen Leach felt like a hero. She and Glass used the fifteen thousand dollars in reward money from the May family to fix their house—Hurricane Katrina had ripped open their ceiling and torn off part of the roof—but only after Ellen fretted for weeks over accepting the money, even though Don May assured her she deserved every penny. He still sends her Christmas cards.
Kies wrote to her,
“The efforts of volunteers like you are in the finest tradition of community pursuit of justice.”

The Greg May case—and Ellen Leach's subsequent appearance on
48 Hours
—propelled web sleuthing into the public spotlight. But behind Ellen's next spectacular solve lurked an ugly backstory.

13

THE HIPPIE AND THE LAWMAN

I
drove past a colonnade of old oaks dripping silvery-gray strands of Spanish moss. The tangled vines overhung the roadway like a canopy, blocking sunlight and turning Route 61 outside of Charleston, South Carolina, into a spooky time-warp arcade of Civil War–era plantations, lush magnolia gardens, and stately Southern manors straight out of
Gone with the Wind
. Forty miles and at least six decades removed from downtown Charleston, tupelo- and cypress-dotted swamps gave way to open fields. The GPS told me I was in Cottageville, although nothing in the landscape signaled anything as intentional as a town.

After miles of asphalt and trees, I spotted a dented mailbox by the roadside and rumbled onto a dirt driveway next to a one-story ramshackle house. On a small folding table displaying a salad-dressing cruet with life-size pansies painted on its sides in purples and greens, a hand-lettered sign declared
PAINTED GLASS $3 AND UP
. Mangled furniture and rusted appliances filled the carport. In a nearby grassy field, a grizzled pony and a broken-down mare grazed. A long-haired gray cat darted out of the path of my rented Captiva and two small dogs flung themselves, yapping, against the kitchen door when I knocked.

Lauran Halleck popped up on web-sleuthing forums like Lindsay Lohan in the tabloids, a onetime player who couldn't seem to pull herself back into the mainstream. Halleck, once accorded the veneration reserved for family of the missing, had, by the time I met her, been banished from at least three prominent web forums. Like Lohan, Halleck refused to
accept exile. In 2012, she went by Old Heifer, an oxymoronic moniker conferred on her by a belligerent, animal husbandry–challenged blogger; Porchlight, an allusion to her own web forum; monkalup, accompanied by a photo of a lugubrious mastiff or a young Roberto Clemente; mquizical; and other pseudonyms. While some members of the popular crime-sleuthing communities Websleuths and JusticeQuest—created in 2008 by a former Websleuths administrator—continued to consider Lauran a tireless advocate for the missing and unidentified, I encountered others who fell silent, snorted, or laughed uneasily when I mentioned her name. Don't eat anything at her house, one person cryptically advised.

On the phone, working out the details of my trip to meet her in South Carolina, Lauran struck me as intelligent and articulate. But stories about the demise of her long-missing “sister,” Jean Marie Stewart, generated a vague sense of dread. I wasn't sure I wanted to meet Lauran Halleck in person.

Jean Marie Stewart's pretty face, striking eyes, and mass of dark curls might one day have propelled her into the modeling career she coveted, but at age sixteen she had inexplicably vanished from a Florida convenience store parking lot. Her missing-person report described her as five foot two, 110 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes, chesty for her small frame, wearing a flowered blouse and jeans. It noted her overbite and the rose tattoo on her right arm.

Years after she was last seen or heard from, her father in Pittsburgh, who at age seventy-five sounded worn down by Jean Marie's disappearance or life in general,
remembered her as an out-of-control teenager
who drank, cut classes, and was enamored of a young man almost ten years her senior. In 1978, the young man and his family—mother, stepfather, and seven siblings—planned to move from Pittsburgh to Florida, and fifteen-year-old Jean Marie wanted desperately to go with them. Robert Stewart and his ex-wife could not dissuade her, so, as a last-ditch concession, he signed paperwork allowing his daughter to leave.

The family that took in Jean Marie settled in an upscale development on a golf course where then Dolphins coach Don Shula sequestered the team in his expansive home on the sixteenth hole before every home game. (The development, Miami Lakes, would eventually become the site of the first restaurant of the well-known Shula's Steak House chain and the Shula's Hotel and Golf Club.)

For almost two years, Jean Marie lived with the large blended family as an unofficial foster child. Lauran Halleck, stepsister to Jean Marie's purported boyfriend, David Nolle, was older than both David, in his early twenties, and Jean Marie, in her teens.

In Florida, Jean Marie was still not a particularly motivated student, but Halleck recalled her as content. She was scheduled to take her driver's license test, and Halleck's stepfather had generously promised to buy her a car. In March 1980, Jean Marie had plane tickets back to Pittsburgh for a visit celebrating her seventeenth birthday and her sister's wedding.

Lauran recalled Jean Marie's eagerness to show her family how successful she was in Miami. She was going home “in style”: her foster parents had bought her a new wardrobe, a round-trip plane ticket, and presents for her family. She also had a few hundred dollars in pocket money.

Jean Marie was a froufrou girl, her hair, nails, and makeup always just so—not the type to rough it, as she might have had to if she ran away from home, Halleck wrote. In any case she couldn't see Jean Marie just walking away from the clothes, the money, and especially the makeup bag she carried with her from room to room.

On March 25, the eve of her trip north, Jean Marie's friends threw her a going-away party. Nolle took her to the party, a few blocks from their home, in his stepfather's Cadillac, Lauran related years later.

Jean Marie had a nice time, but by nine o'clock was ready to go home to prepare for her flight the next morning.

Halleck's brother started to drive home, but Jean asked him to stop at a convenience store on the way. Jean had already kicked off her shoes, as
was her habit, so she asked Nolle to buy her cigarettes. There were no other customers and it took less than two minutes to make the purchase. When Nolle returned to the car, Jean was gone, her shoes, purse, and makeup bag still in the car.

Lauran said later that she, Nolle, and the rest of the family searched the area for hours that night, finding no trace of the teenager. The family never heard from her again, and she never made it to her sister's wedding.

Earlier on the same day that I drove to her house in rural Cottageville, Lauran met me for lunch in Charleston. Keeping an eye out in the lobby of my hotel, I spotted a troll of a woman laboring up the stairs. Maybe five feet tall, she had granny glasses perched on her tiny nose and a purple, butterfly-shaped plastic clip restraining an enormous sheath of straight gray hair that skimmed the backs of her knees. She wore a short-sleeved chambray blouse, jeans faded almost white, and child-sized black athletic shoes.

Halleck and I strolled cobblestone streets past historic brick tenements, which now housed boutiques and upscale restaurants, to a waterfront park where a large fountain splashed and Fort Sumter was visible in the distance. The daughter of politically active liberals, Halleck described herself as a onetime horsewoman who for years toured and competed on the rodeo circuit with her former husband. She was childless but had for a time worked as a teacher and taken in dozens of foster teens the way her family had taken in Jean Marie. Years ago, driving up the coast from her family's Florida home, she had become enamored with South Carolina and decided to stay. Now she was retired and in poor health. “Two heart attacks, angioplasty, stents, artificial heart pumps, surgery and I am still here, Jean,” she once posted online. “Still searching. Still missing you. Please come home.”

Fans whirred over our heads in the vaulted ceiling of the brick-faced city market. Vendors hawked crayon-colored T-shirts, handmade pottery, waffle-weave hand towels, glass lanterns, bowls carved from hunks of honey-­colored, finely grained swamp cypress, and bags of locally ground hominy grits. She had never developed a taste for grits, Halleck admitted. She fed the stuff to her chickens.

We paused in front of a very round woman perched on a stool behind a riot of buff-colored woven baskets and bowls, some voluminous enough to hold a pheasant and others that would accommodate no more than a few marbles. The gullah, whose hands never stopped whipping tender stalks back and forth as if she were fighting off the devil with short swords, grinned toothlessly when Halleck admired the dozens of baskets encircling the woman's skirts. I later learned that in the 1800s African slaves fashioned such baskets out of indigenous low-country sweetgrass to carry food and such in homes and fields. The art, handed down from generation to generation, survives only in Charleston.

Halleck told me later that she was a huge fan of Roberto Clemente, who'd played for her hometown Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960s. One of her most treasured possessions was a fielding mitt she claimed he had given her when she was a girl. Clemente was known for his formidable skills on the field and also for helping underprivileged children from his native Puerto Rico improve their lives through baseball. Each of Lauran's web posts ended with a Clemente quote: “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.”

Lauran struck me as a born romantic, a child of the sixties. “Are you a former hippie?” I asked as we eyed a display of tie-dyed T-shirts.

“Still am!” she said, grinning.

Given Halleck's countercultural streak, it didn't surprise me that her nemesis was a ramrod-spined Texas lawman.

In December 2007, a trim, silver-haired man who looked like Edward Woodward in the 1980s crime series
The Equalizer
stood next to an attractive blonde some years his junior on unpaved County Road 101 where it dead-ended at Route 288 in the oil town of Manvel, Texas. The pair, busy photographing what looked like a patch of bare earth, didn't notice the cars flying by—north toward Houston and south toward the Gulf Coast—or the figure in a baseball cap and tennis shoes striding toward them.

“What are you doing here?” Baseball Cap demanded.

“Why do you want to know?” Silver Fox countered. “This is a public road.”

Baseball Cap identified himself as a Manvel police officer. He was suspicious of the couple's presence at the very spot where, in 1990, a motorist getting out of his car to take a leak nearly stumbled on a pile of bones that turned out to belong to a young woman. Between seventeen and twenty-one years old, petite—around five feet—she was found wearing six rings, among them a silver Robert E. Lee High School ring with a deep-blue sapphire. Princess Blue, as she had come to be known, was not identified; her attacker had not been caught.

For nearly thirty years, as the young cop and almost everyone else in the region knew, multiple killers had abducted, raped, and murdered dozens of women and dumped their bodies in isolated spots along what became known as the Highway from Hell—the Interstate 45 corridor from Galveston to Dallas, which, with Route 288, created a pie-shaped wedge encompassing rural Brazoria and Galveston counties. A single vacant lot in League City, just inside the wedge, had come to be known as “the killing fields” after four girls' bodies were found there on four separate occasions between 1983 and 1991.

What the young cop didn't know was that he was in the presence of none other than thirty-five-year law enforcement veteran and private investigator Matt Wingo—former investigator with the Brazoria County district attorney's office and
son of the late “man hunter”
Cecil Wingo, FBI criminal profiler, two-time police chief of nearby Angleton, Texas, and longtime chief investigator for the Harris County medical examiner.

The Manvel cop surely couldn't have guessed that the man before him and his lady friend had sought out Princess Blue's death scene the way some people embarked on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. It was their first date.

Matt Wingo's companion, Kristy Gault, ran a website dedicated to unidentified and missing persons.
Gault had traveled to Texas from Ohio
partly to document the eerily deserted locations where the remains of Princess Blue and other possible victims of the notorious serial killer or killers had been found (she would later post on her site one of the photos she took that day) and partly to meet Wingo, who was as haunted by the deaths as she was.

Investigators never agreed on how many killers were involved in the Texas slayings, the subject of several books and movies. Murders committed in the 1980s appeared to copycat the original 1970s crimes; one FBI profiler believed that as many as five or more murderers may have taken advantage of this boggy, desolate region of oil refineries within easy reach of megacities Dallas and Houston. There were so many Jane Does among the victims that police took to mounting their pictures on I-45 billboards.

In his heyday as a detective,
Matt Wingo had worked as many as three such homicides in one night. Now retired, he had never given up hope that Princess Blue and the other unidentified serial-killer victims would be identified and their murderers prosecuted.

The baseball-cap cop looked at the pair, considering. He acknowledged that Wingo's name rang a bell. Still, he told them he needed to run checks on both of them, and on Gault's car. The Manvel police chief would later demand that Wingo stay out of his town for good. Wingo never for a moment considered halting his expeditions to the dumping grounds.

Kristy Gault, aka Miss Killjoy and Starless, avid gardener and reputed onetime exotic dancer, enlivened her daily posts to the bare-bones bulletin board she had founded, Cold Case Investigations (also called OCCI, for Official Cold Case Investigations, and later Cold Case Examiner), with a dizzying array of animated icons: twirling blue stars, dancing pink milk cartons with legs, leaping exclamation points, frenetic lightning strikes, buzzing bees trapped in jars. When I told her why I was calling,
Gault revealed she was working
on her own book, each chapter describing an unidentified body—some I had heard of, many I hadn't. Gault had an uncanny memory for the unidentified. When I mentioned the Lady of the Dunes, she rattled off the particulars as though she'd just seen the police report. She seemed happy to chat with a like-minded caller; she confided that the uninitiated often found her pursuit a bit off-putting.