The Murder Room Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - THE MURDER ROOM

  • CHAPTER 1 • - THE CONNOISSEURS OF MURDER

  • CHAPTER 2 • - THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

  • CHAPTER 3 • - THE KNIGHTS OF THE CAFÉ TABLE

  PART TWO - FOUR BOYS

  •CHAPTER 4 • - A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

  • CHAPTER 5 • - COPS AND ROBBERS

  • CHAPTER 6 • - THE MAN WHO SAW DEAD PEOPLE

  • CHAPTER 7 • - SHADES OF THE DARK KNIGHT

  • CHAPTER 8 • - GUARDIANS OF THE CITY

  • CHAPTER 9 • - COLD EYES FROM THE PAST

  • CHAPTER 10 • - ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSIN

  • CHAPTER 11 • - DEATH OF A B-GIRL

  • CHAPTER 12 • - THE VISUAL DETECTIVE

  • CHAPTER 13 • - THE MAN WITH THE BAD STOMACH

  • CHAPTER 14 • - ON THE TRAIL OF THE WARLOCK

  • CHAPTER 15 • - THE RELUCTANT KNIGHT-ERRANT

  • CHAPTER 16 • - THE PERFECT MASS MURDER

  • CHAPTER 17 • - THE MASK OF THE INVISIBLE MAN

  • CHAPTER 18 • - THE RETURN OF VIDOCQ

  PART THREE - THE VIDOCQ SOCIETY

  • CHAPTER 19 • - THE GATHERING OF DETECTIVES

  • CHAPTER 20 • - BUSTED

  • CHAPTER 21 • - THE DETECTIVE OF SOULS

  • CHAPTER 22 • - THE DEATH ARTIST

  • CHAPTER 23 • - DREAMS OF MORPHEUS

  • CHAPTER 24 • - A CASE THEY CAN’T LET GO

  • CHAPTER 25 • - THE BUTCHER OF CLEVELAND

  • CHAPTER 26 • - IMPLORING GOD

  • CHAPTER 27 • - THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  • CHAPTER 28 • - CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

  • CHAPTER 29 • - THE CASE OF THE SHOELESS CORPSE

  • CHAPTER 30 • - THE CASE OF THE PRODIGAL SON

  • CHAPTER 31 • - THE SAGE OF SCOTLAND YARD

  • CHAPTER 32 • - THINK THEREFORE ON REVENGE

  • CHAPTER 33 • - MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

  • CHAPTER 34 • - WHAT I WANT TO HEAR ARE HANDCUFFS

  • CHAPTER 35 • - THE CONSULTING DETECTIVES

  PART FOUR - BATTLING MONSTERS

  • CHAPTER 36 • - TAKE ME TO THE PSYCHOPATH

  • CHAPTER 37 • - THE STRANGER IN BIDDLE HOUSE

  • CHAPTER 38 • - CITY OF BROTHERLY MAYHEM

  • CHAPTER 39 • - WRATH SWEETER BY FAR THAN THE HONEYCOMB

  • CHAPTER 40 • - THE WORST MOTHER IN HISTORY

  • CHAPTER 41 • - THE BOY WHO NEVER DIED

  • CHAPTER 42 • - THE EIGHT BABIES CALLED “IT”

  • CHAPTER 43 • - MURDER IN TRIPLICATE

  • CHAPTER 44 • - FROM HEAVEN TO HELL

  • CHAPTER 45 • - THE DESCENT

  • CHAPTER 46 • - IN THE WORLD WHICH WILL BE RENEWED

  • CHAPTER 47 • - “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE FOUND YOUR KILLER”

  • CHAPTER 48 • - INTERROGATION

  • CHAPTER 49 • - THE HAUNTING OF MARY

  • CHAPTER 50 • - THE CASE OF THE MISSING FACE

  • CHAPTER 51 • - THE KILLER ANGELS

  • CHAPTER 52 • - THE GHOST

  • CHAPTER 53 • - THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL

  • CHAPTER 54 • - DEATH IN THE TIME OF BANANAS

  • CHAPTER 55 • - THE MIRACLE ON SOUTH STREET

  • CHAPTER 56 • - KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLES

  Acknowledgements

  • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY •

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  Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Michael Capuzzo

  All rights reserved

  Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Capuzzo, Mike.

  The murder room : the heirs of Sherlock Holmes gather to solve the world’s

  most perplexing cold cases / Michael Capuzzo.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-45895-2

  1. Murder—United States—Case studies. 2. Vidocq Society. I. Title.

  HV6529.C37 2010

  363.25’95230973—dc22 2010005044

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  For Teresa

  PROLOGUE

  THE PROFILER AND THE PRIEST

  Hudson, Wisconsin, December 2004

  The profiler would not shake hands with the priest. It was unacceptable, intolerable if he was to go in for the kill. And the profiler always went in for the kill. That was the thing that excited him most. It never ceased to enthrall him, even in retirement.

  The priest had swept in, cassock whirling, smiling and pumping familiar hands, trailing an assistant “to puff himself up with more power,” the profiler noted. The Father was a large man, commanding in his black garb; bearded, youthful face cracked in a welcoming Midwestern smile. Next to him the profiler seemed shrunken, emaciated, pale as a ghost. He coughed up a lung with each cigarette, at least three times an hour. He also was an atheist, sneering and quite cynical about the whole question. But that was not the point.

  The point was moral standards must be upheld as a matter of honor, a point of manhood. The more immediate point was control, and the thin man would not let the psychopath acquire it, not for a moment. Each moment in life, he believed, was a choice: a step toward good or evil, dominance or submission, authenticity or falsehood. He did not tolerate the lesser choices. He did not
tolerate those who crossed the line invading common decency. This made him a lot of enemies. He was proud to have enemies. “One should never apologize for being right,” he said.

  Now the big, fleshy hand near to God was outstretched toward the thin man in fellowship. The others, the police chief and two detectives, were watching.

  The profiler wrinkled his aquiline nose in disgust, “as if I was being offered a piece of dog shit.” Swiftly he withdrew his hand and turned away. He was pleased to see a stricken look fleetingly cross the priest’s face. Then, “composure returned like a sheen coating the hollow man.”

  It was always all about control. The profiler had instructed the chief how to introduce him. No name, no city or rank, only “this is a man from out of town who is an expert on murder.” Once the detective introduced the profiler as instructed, the thin man shook hands with the priest with Victorian courtesy, like the old-school gentleman he was. Then he sat in the corner, legs folded, lip turned in a sneer, quietly watching as the police asked the priest about the murders.

  The police were no closer to an arrest than they had been that afternoon in broad daylight when the town was shocked from a century of innocence in such matters, unimagined and unimaginable, with the execution-style murder of two prominent citizens. The police had once had eleven suspects and now, two years later, had moved no further. The profiler studied the case file and chatted with the police for three hours before narrowing the eleven suspects to one. “It’s the priest,” he told the police. “Of course, I know you don’t want it to be the priest. Nonetheless, it’s the priest.” The thin man had appeared on the front page of the small-town newspaper declaring he was “quite confident” the mysterious murders would soon be solved. “If I were the killer,” he quipped, “I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

  The police hadn’t known what to expect when they presented the cold case in the nineteenth-century men’s club in Philadelphia to the world’s greatest detectives. The French flags, the walnut paneling, the chandeliers made them nervous. There was an immense, portly, bearded man with a huge head, a man of a thousand jokes they called the Grand Inquisitor; a slim, short, muscular artist, bald with a white goatee and dressed all in black, who saw dead people; and the gaunt profiler with the face of Poe. There were a hundred others, famous sleuths, the FBI agent whose movie double nails Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, investigators of the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, too many to remember.

  They said they’d consider taking the case, possibly organize a team.

  Then one man, the thin man, got off the plane alone.

  And now he watched as the priest sat before him and fielded questions from the police with dignity and poise. The priest sat erect with his elbows on the table, his hands tented as if in prayer. The detectives asked him about the young boys. The priest sat back with umbrage; the mere suggestion was an insult. The detectives pushed harder, with names and dates, until the priest had to admit to sex with the young teenagers. But the priest told the police they badly misunderstood. He was not assaulting the boys. He was teaching them sex education.

  There was quiet. A detective looked to the corner and asked if the profiler had any questions.

  The thin man leaned forward and removed his glasses to stare at the priest. “To begin with, if I were in charge of this investigation, you would not be wearing that costume.” He spat out the word “costume” as if it were something foul.

  “I’m a priest twenty-four hours a day!” the priest objected.

  The profiler gave the priest a merciless glare and scowled in deepening disgust. “Here, you are not representing the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in fact, what you’re doing is representing a failed man.”

  The priest blanched and fell silent. The police resumed their questioning about the boys. The priest repeated his educational theory, his justifications. Of course, he got them drunk first; they were too ashamed of their bodies otherwise. Then he got them excited. But he didn’t bring them to climax. He was teaching them responsible sexuality. It’s not wrong to get a hard-on, it’s wrong to use it.

  The thin man’s voice rose shrilly from the corner. “Ridiculous! You’re a pervert!”

  The police asked the priest to remove his cassock. It had been the profiler’s idea. “With this sort of psychopath, we must do everything to rattle him.” Indeed the priest seemed a smaller man after he pulled off the cassock and removed the undershirt beneath. The police compared the tattoo on his shoulder with one a witness described. It was a match.

  As the priest pulled his undergarment back on, and then his cassock, the profiler stood and approached him, coming very close, and gave him a death stare. He kept staring, implacable, his eyes as cold and unrelenting as a night wind, until the priest looked down and away. Suddenly, the profiler’s heart leaped in joy, though he kept his face expressionless as a smoothed stone.

  The priest was crying!

  “A tear of hatred slowly trilled down his cheek,” the thin man noted. “It was quite lovely.”

  They were standing two feet apart, the man of law and the man of God. As the tear dissolved into the thick beard, the big man wiped it away, then looked up into the thin man’s eyes with loathing and slowly hissed:

  “God . . . damn . . . it!”

  The thin man couldn’t contain himself. He was grinning openly.

  “Was it a thrill to hear this man of the cloth taking the name of the Lord in vain?” Indeed it was.

  “I knew then the bitch was mine.”

  THE VOICE OF THE BLOOD

  In the beginning of the world all hope was lost. But there were three men:

  The chieftain, the warrior, the shaman.

  The king, the knight, the wizard.

  We tell these stories to survive. The story swirls in smoke, fabric, and music; spins in the winds of the gods and the vortex of DNA. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson calls such stories “The Voice of the Species”—the essential stories formed by the “epigenetic rules of human nature ...the inborn rules of mental development.”

  This tale, the most enduring in the west outside the Holy Bible, was first written down more than eight hundred years ago. Between the years 1129 and 1151 a Benedictine monk who taught at Oxford translated into Latin, at his bishop’s request, a series of ancient Celtic prophecies, Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin). The monk then wrote Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), pieces of which were handed down to him from the oldest written Welsh sources, the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch. In these texts can be found fragments of the first historical record of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

  The story, as told numberless times across the centuries, begins with the world in ruins. Crops wither, even the trees are dead, “tortured bones of a perished race, of monsters no mortal knows,” the poet cries. The wounded king ails in his castle, powerless. The king cannot act without help; he needs two other men to embark on a journey, men of great and unique talents to complement his own.

  Why we ceaselessly tell this story is a mystery. Scientists cannot explain why Homo sapiens must take in oxygen and release certain stories to live.

  Philosophers say the ultimate source of the story is the eternal human need to find, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “the promise enshrined in the Mysteries since the beginning of the world.” The prophets say it is our pathway through trials to the grace of God. A man of action might say the relevant point of more than a million years of human trial, error, and wisdom embedded in the story is entirely practical:

  When the world breaks and needs fixing, the thing to do is find the right three men.

  PART ONE

  THE MURDER ROOM

  • CHAPTER 1 •

  THE CONNOISSEURS OF MURDER

  The great hall was filled with the lingering aroma of pork and mallard duck sausage as black-vested waiters appeared, shouldering cups of vanilla bean blancmange. Connoisseurs sat at tables
between the hearths under glittering eighteenth-century chandeliers, chatting amiably in several languages. When the coffee arrived, a fine Colombian supremo steaming in its pots, the image of the corpse of a young man of uncommon beauty, lying on his back, materialized in the center of the room.

  A gray winter light slanted into the hall, as the midday sun had sailed beyond the city, and the image on the large screen was crisp. The young man’s blond locks were matted in a corona of dried blood, his sculpted cheekbones reduced to a pulp. The police photograph had been taken at night in a restaurant alley, and the surrounding scene was obscured in darkness. Yet the strobe light had thrown the young man’s face into sharp relief. Out of the shadows of a distant southern night, the stark, wide-open eyes loomed over the room.

  It was shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, and the fifth and final course had been served to the connoisseurs of the Vidocq Society.

  “My goodness,” said a short-haired young woman in a red dress. Patting her mouth with a napkin, she excused herself from the table and, a hand over her mouth, hurried to the door. William Fleisher, a big man in a magnificent blue suit, WLF embroidered on his custom shirt, sadly shook his large, bearded head. “We need to do a better job screening guests,” he said. Richard Walter, his gaunt cheekbones sunken in the wan light, glared at the departing figure. Frank Bender—clad in a tight black T-shirt and jeans, the only man in the hall not wearing a suit—whispered to the detective next to him, “Nice legs.”