CHAPTER 20
This was one winter Hank Powell was not sorry to see go.
It had been a rough one.
But, he thought, smiling, things were looking up. He turned his back on the window and sat down at his desk.
In front of him was a stack of file folders that had come in from all over the U.S. and Canada. Eleven FBI field offices, twelve police departments, nine sheriff’s departments, and the Forensic Laboratory Services Directorate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had all contributed to what had evolved into an extraordinary effort to stop the Alphabet Man.
Everything had come together, and now Hank Powell’s job was to sift through several pounds of paper and try to make sense of it all. If he could do that, then the slow, cum-bersome, but unstoppable machinery of justice would go to work. The parents, friends, and families of the thirteen murdered girls they knew about could-if not find peace-at least begin to put this behind them. No one knew how many young women who might have been future victims would now be spared.
And no one knew if there were other victims, other murdered girls who just hadn’t been found, who hadn’t been part of the pattern.
Hank felt weighed down by the responsibility, but somehow elated at the same time. He’d been living with this so long that to finally see an end in sight made the weight somehow more bearable.
He set a legal pad and pen on his desk to the right of the folders, then opened the first one. He had stacked the folders by order of the murders; the A murder had been committed in Cincinnati, so the reports from the Cincinnati Police Department’s Homicide Squad and the Cincinnati FBI Field Office were first in the pile. Hank began reading and making notes.
Then he worked his way, over the next five hours, through the reports from Macon, Georgia, then Scottsdale, Arizona, followed by Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York City, Vancouver, Omaha, Chattanooga, Dallas, and finally, Nashville.
Twelve cities: thirteen brutal, senseless murders.
He took a quick break for a late lunch, then went back to work on the files, this time going over the extensive background material on Michael Schiftmann. The agent out of the Cleveland Field Office, a young guy named Kelly, had done an outstanding job of compiling a biography of Michael Schiftmann. Hank read the interview with Schiftmann’s mother and got about as much out of it as Kelly did, but it was the interview with the neighbor that caught his attention.
Schiftmann’s mother had painted a portrait of a lonely, mistreated kid who was smarter than the other children, worked harder, was fiercely devoted to books and his stud-ies, and was ashamed of his impoverished background.
“Okay,” Hank muttered out loud. “Lots of lonely, weird, nerdy kids don’t grow up to be serial killers, though.”
But the interview with the neighbor, an eighty-one-year-old disabled WWII veteran named Stan Walonsky, painted an entirely different picture. Walonsky had used terms like
“psycho” and “bastard” in describing Schiftmann. This, in and of itself, would have very little credibility. Sometimes people simply dislike each other. But Walonsky had specific examples to back up his claims.
When Michael Schiftmann was eleven, for instance, Walonsky caught him in an outbuilding that he used for a workshop and for storage, masturbating to a pornographic magazine. Walonsky told on the boy, and apparently his mother administered a pretty severe whipping.
“I really didn’t mean for the boy to take a beating like that,” Kelly quoted Walonsky as saying. “I just thought maybe the kid needed some help.”
In any case, Walonsky added, two days later the building burned down in the middle of the night. As the firemen were fighting the fire, trying to keep it from spreading to the nearby houses, Walonsky caught a glimpse of Michael Schiftmann in an upstairs bedroom window, looking down on the scene and smiling.
Walonsky had told the arson investigators about the kid, but his mother had covered for him, insisting he’d never been out of his bedroom that night.
A year later, Walonsky’s wife’s cat was found dead, the body horribly mutilated. Somebody had obviously tortured the cat to death. Hank grimaced as he read the details. But he also knew that in the details lay the truth.
Hank had twenty years in with the FBI, but he’d come to VICAP in the mid-nineties, long after the pioneer FBI profiler Robert Ressler had retired. He’d never met Ressler, but he’d read all his books and studied his work intensely.
Ressler discovered that serial killers often, in fact commonly, shared three traits from childhood. They enjoyed torturing animals, enjoyed setting fires, and were chronic bed wetters.
If Walonsky was telling the truth, Hank mused, Michael Schiftmann was batting .666.
But as he read on, he realized that there were even other indicators. Michael Schiftmann’s academic records were revealing. In ninth grade, he tested out on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Survey as having an IQ of 156-genius level and then some. A sympathetic guidance counselor apparently became interested in the young boy and helped him get a scholarship to the Benton Academy, an exclusive private school on the lakeshore near Oberlin. There, Hank read, Schiftmann apparently learned the art of getting in trouble without getting caught with his hand too far in the cookie jar. His file from the Benton Academy indicated that he was constantly in and out of minor scrapes. He got caught smoking a few times, but always cigarettes, never pot. He got caught drinking beer in his senior year, but not hard liquor.
And in every instance, it seemed, he had an explanation. It was always somebody else’s booze, somebody else brought the cigarettes, it was somebody else’s idea to take that sneak Saturday night.
Schiftmann, Hank noted, did graduate from the academy.
But his grades were chronically low-skating along in the low C, high D range-and he actually attended graduation under disciplinary probation. With his brains, he could’ve aced every course in school without cracking a book. But he was, one teacher noted, “a chronic underachiever.”
There were also notes in his Benton file from guidance counselors and teachers who struggled to get a handle on this kid. He had problems with authority, with women, with appropriate social behavior. Of course, Hank realized, he’d just read descriptions of the majority of adolescent males in the country. But this was different. The tone of the guidance counselor reports was serious, foreboding, as if the counselors could see there was something at work here besides adolescent rebellion.
After private school, Schiftmann actually managed to put in two semesters at the University of Virginia, paying with a combination of scholarships and student loans. But his grades here were equally dismal and there were numerous disciplinary problems as well, including one incident when Michael got in a fight at a drunken frat party and actually broke a guy’s arm. He left college at the end of his freshman year.
After that, Michael Schiftmann’s life became a blur. He apparently worked menial jobs and switched them often.
His social security records revealed he rarely made over ten grand a year for a decade-long stretch. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment in a run-down complex in a down-scale section of Cleveland, paying less than four hundred a month in rent and probably barely scraping that up.
Somewhere along the way, and God only knew how, Michael Schiftmann switched from being an inveterate reader to an aspiring writer. The first publication anyone could find was a science-fiction short story in an obscure fanzine published out of Cleveland. Then, a few years later, he published his first novel, a mystery that was
