available for analysis by forensic technologies that at the time of the murders did not exist.
I examine the crime scene photographs. Like everything else in the case file, I find them meticulously keyed in Mace's hand to numbers inscribed on the lower right corners: (1) VICTIMS VIEWED
FROM FOOT OF BED; (2) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM NORTH WALL; (3) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM BATHROOM DOORWAY… the list goes on.
The pictures are brutal. It's the harsh colors that makes them so, and their total lack of artistry. It's clear no effort was expended on lighting or composition. These are straight-on, flash-lit police photographs that rob the victims of anything heroic. I barely recognize the neat and undistinguished motel room where I executed by moody drawings. The room, depicted in these photographs, appears smaller, more confining, and totally befouled. I sense the photographer's distaste, his wish to quickly do his job and get out. In one shot I note a reflection in the mirror above the bureau of young, eager Mace Bartel holding a handkerchief to his nose, watching with disgust.
Enough! I prefer my own drawings, my imagined romantic renderings of the scene. When I drew the slain lovers, I wrapped them in gloom; in these pictures, their bodies are etched by a pitiless strobe.
I turn back to the file folders, start reading through eyewitness statements. There isn't much of substance.
Motel office clerk Johnny Powell thought the shots were backfire noises. By the time he turned to look, all he saw was the back of a man in a black raincoat running toward the street.
A Mr. Jeff Slade, vendor of kewpie dolls and other amusement park prizes and giveaways, was returning to his room on foot after a taxing negotiation with the managers at Tremont Park, when he saw a man rush from the Flamingo Court into the adjoining parking lot. He didn't think much about it until a few seconds later when, entering the courtyard, he saw a number of people wearing dazed expressions standing on the motel balconies. Perhaps, Mr. Slade surmised, it was on account of his military training that he turned just as a dark car pulled rapidly out of the lot. He identified the car as a late-model Olds and caught a quick glance of the driver. The product of this sighting accompanies the interview report, a crude Identi-Kit portrait that resembles a classic square-faced cartoon thug. At the bottom, the interviewing officer notes that he doubts the reliability of Slade's account as two other persons independently identified the suspect as a four-year-old Chevrolet.
A Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cranston from Buffalo reported a fleeing black-hatted, black-raincoated man, as did a Miss Bonnie Lanette, known to local police as a prostitute who worked the grounds of the amusement park and frequently brought her johns to the Flamingo for fun and games.
Two small children were interviewed, a boy and a girl who'd been frolicking in the pool at the time. Neither could offer anything beyond the fact that a man had run down the exterior stairs then out toward the parking area just after the shots.
All four of the ejected shotgun shells had been wiped clean of fingerprints, suggesting a well-thought out professional hit. It was also conjectured that since the shooter had worn a long coat and wide brim hat, he was also probably wearing gloves.
Mr. Andrew Fulraine, through his attorneys, offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. Later this offer was raised to $75,000 and still later to $100,000. Investigators passed on word of this offer, huge for the time, in the hope of prying information from snitches. In fact, according to an advisory from the FBI, only two men in the entire Midwest were suspected of specializing in hitman work, neither of whom had recently been sighted in the Calista area.
A search of public trash barrels, private garbage cans, and construction debris, Dumpsters within a quarter- mile radius of the Flamingo yielded no sign of weapon, hat, coat, or gloves. A thorough but fruitless search was made of trash-collection points within Tremont Park on the theory that the car seen leaving the motel parking lot might not have been an escape vehicle driven by the shooter. Rather, according to this alternative theory, the shooter had left the scene on foot, then merged into the crowds that thronged the amusement park that hot, humid afternoon.
Fliers were printed up and placed beneath the doors of all rooms at the Flamingo, also posted on telephone poles and lampposts surrounding the motel, soliciting information abut anyone seen hovering suspiciously in the vicinity of the motel as far back as a week before the killings.
Six people responded to this solicitation. None was able to provide any information beyond the fact that they'd seen a man (described by some as ‘tall and thin,’ by others as ‘medium height and stocky’) either strolling by the motel at a suspiciously slow speed.
A thirty-two-year-old black man named Ralph ‘Snooky’ Vaughan, former employee of the Flamingo fired three months before for petty pilfering of soap, toilet tissue, and other room disposables, was interviewed by Detective Joe Burns for six hours. Vaughan had a criminal record for minor crimes going back to his early teenage years. A search of his room in a Gunktown rooming house produced a black raincoat and black fedora-style hat. Vaughan swore he'd been nowhere near the Flamingo Court since the day he was fired and had been engaged in a game of pick-up basketball on a housing project court the afternoon of the shootings. Nine witnesses verified his alibi. When his coat proved negative for powder burns, he was released.
Seven of Barbara Fulraine's former lovers were interviewed, culled from a list provided by her ex. Of the seven, five were married. All begged investigators not to leak their names.
Charles Maw was associate director of the Calista Repertory Theater Company. He stated that he had been a longtime friend of Barbara Fulraine, that they'd been lovers prior to her marriage, and had resumed their affair approximately six months after the Fulraine child was snatched.
Maw stated he had acted as intermediary in a bizarre encounter in connection with the earlier crime. According to his account, about a year and a half after the snatching, Mrs. Fulraine, desperate to find her daughter, was actively consulting gypsy fortune-tellers around town. One, a card reader who worked out of a storefront at Danvers and 36^th, told her that her child was dead and promised to provide information on the whereabouts of the body in exchange for $15,000 cash, $5,000 to be paid up front, the balance upon delivery of the girl's corpse.
A late night meeting was arranged. Charles Maw, acting for Mrs. Fulraine, placed the $10,000 final payment in a locker at the Central Bus Terminal, then followed a chain of complicated instructions that led him, in the style of a treasure hunt, from a public phone booth to a message secreted in the men's room of a Gunktown bar to another message hidden beneath a rock on the east bank of the Calista River. Finally, he was picked up by a van with blacked-out windows, driven around town for a while, then into a garage at an unknown location.
Here a man and two women, faces encased in stockings, pointed to a cardboard carton that, they said, contained the preserved remains of the Fulraine child. When Maw opened the carton, he found what he took to be the body of an infant, but the lighting was so dim, the odor so horrific, the corpse so wrinkled and distorted, he could not possibly identify it as Belle Fulraine. Nevertheless, intimidated by the people surrounding him, he handed over the key to the locker, at which point the three jumped into the van and sped off, leaving him alone with the pungent leathery remains.
When Maw picked up the carton and stumbled out of the garage, he found himself not two hundred yards from smelters with smokestacks bearing the words FULRAINE STEEL.
It had been a swindle, of course. The little body was that of a black male infant, preserved, according to experts, in a manner employed by Haitian voodoo practitioners. By the time police were brought in, the $10,000 was gone and the storefront card reader had disappeared. The incident marked the end of Charles Maw's affair with Barbara Fulraine and left him with badly shattered nerves.
It's a strange story and it fills me with pity. It hurts to think of Barbara stooping so low, then being taken in by such a transparent scam. That she was running around consulting with scummy fortune-tellers tells me how very desperate she must have been. As for Maw, he strikes me as a fool. What kind of friend was he not to have warned her off these con artists?'
The six other interviewed former lovers were a junior executive at Fulraine Steel; a star third baseman with the Calista Forgers; a cellist who played with the Calista Symphony; an orthopedic surgeon from the Lucinda Taft Medical Center; a professor of theology at Calista State University; and a mechanic who worked at British Motors in Van Buren Heights where he took care of Mrs. Fulraine's Jaguar coupe.
All spoke of her with affection and respect, not one expressing the slightest degree of ill will. The mechanic described her as ‘a gracious person’ whom it had been his ‘great privilege’ to know. The theologian said, ‘She was quite the finest woman I've ever known.’ The cellist said that making love with her was ‘akin to reveling in the music of the spheres.’ Charles Maw, the only one to make negative comments, described her as ‘a user who left
