Dead Connection

independence she’d never felt before. At the same time, these desperate, fleeting encounters with men who shared no common social connection made her feel profoundly alone in the world.

Having read Caroline’s scribbled words, Ellie somehow felt lonelier as well. Caroline Hunter was smart, reflective, and had something original and provocative to say. She should still be alive. Ellie closed the notebook and finally resolved to go home.

6

THAT EVENING, IN A WOOD-FRAMED RANCH HOUSE IN WICHITA, Kansas, Roberta Hatcher was doing exactly what she did every night. She was watching her shows on a console television set and pouring herself a vodka on the rocks from the bottle of Smirnoff that rested on the tray table next to her reclining chair.

When she married Jerry Hatcher thirty-five years ago, she never expected to be a widow. No one ever thinks about those possibilities when they are young. Even if she had considered the fact that one of them would have to go first, and the statistical likelihood that it would be Jerry, she certainly never would have anticipated that she’d be left a widow so early, with a daughter just starting high school and a son who barely managed to finish.

It had been more than fifteen years since her husband died. That’s how she always worded it: Jerry had simply died. The newspapers and the police department said Jerry shot himself. That was the official account, so of course that’s what they said.

Ellie, however, always made sure that her father was the object of the sentence, not the subject. At first, Ellie insisted on saying that her father “was murdered.” Over time, though, even Ellie tired of the reaction those words triggered – looks of sympathy for a fatherless girl of questionable mental health. Over time, Ellie adopted a tamer version of her father’s death. He “was killed,” she usually said.

Last year, when the national news briefly cared about the long-delayed capture of the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had hauled out the M-word again. I truly believe my father was murdered by William Summer. She repeated that same sentence to whatever reporters would listen. She willingly played the role she’d come to despise at the age of fourteen – the haunted fatherless child. She even spun the story of a young female cop following in her father’s footsteps, as if he had encouraged her in that direction. As if it weren’t his son that traditional, conventional Jerry had always pushed to be a cop. As if Jerry had even noticed his little daughter desperately offering her own theories about the killer named for his preferred stalking territory in the otherwise quiet College Hill neighborhood south of WSU.

Ellie didn’t care whether the papers got her story right. She only cared about one truth. Ellie swallowed her pride, played the game, and did everything she could to get the news, the city, the police department – anyone – to take another look at Jerry’s death.

At the time, she insisted that she was doing all of this for herself. According to Ellie, she needed to see that son of a bitch William Summer – the man finally connected to the College Hill Strangler pseudonym – take full account for his victims, including Detective Jerry Hatcher. She needed to see her father vindicated.

But Roberta knew there was more to it. Her daughter rarely did anything for herself, and this campaign to declare her father’s death another College Hill murder was no different. Ellie was doing it for her family. That is what Ellie had done for nearly as long as Roberta could remember – taken care of her and Jess.

Ellie knew that, more than ever, Roberta could use that money from Jerry’s life insurance and pension, long ago denied to her. Suicides, Roberta had been informed, were not in the line of duty. And death by suicide was what they called it.

Her husband was found in the driver’s seat of his car, pulled to the side of a country road north of Wichita. A single bullet was discharged from his service revolver, into the roof of his mouth, through his brain and skull, and lodged into the roof of his Mercury Sable. Gunpowder residue was found on Jerry’s hands, in a pattern consistent with a self-inflicted gun wound, she was told. He left no note, she pointed out repeatedly. That wasn’t uncommon, the department’s shrink explained. Jerry had, after all, been raised Catholic.

Jerry had also been depressed, the department emphasized. And obsessed. And disenchanted. On these points, Roberta could not argue. Her husband had certainly changed from the man she knew twenty years before his death. She, Jerry, their marriage, and their family had all begun to change on February 2, 1978, when he was called out to what became one of the city’s most notorious crime scenes.

The dead were a single mother and her two children. All three of the victims were bound, blindfolded, and strangled. Semen on a rag found near the twelve-year-old daughter’s body suggested that the killer got to the young girl last and -

Roberta tried to block out the details of the scene as she took another sip of vodka. Unfortunately, the images – and those from the murders that would come later – were far too ingrained in her memory. She could only imagine how they affected her daughter. Little Ellie, sneaking all the time into that damn basement to be a part of her father’s hobby. Roberta should have insisted on a padlock.

In theory, Jerry should have stopped working the case when the Wichita Police Department disbanded the College Hill Strangler task force a few years after his last known kill. When the trademark communications and murders appeared to stop, everyone assumed the man was either dead or in prison.

But not Roberta’s husband. The files, the photographs, a killer’s self-aggrandizing letters to police and the media – the College Hill Strangler investigation itself – continued to decorate tabletops, nightstands, and every surface of her basement walls for another decade. After Jerry’s death, the department seized it all. All that Roberta and her children were left with were the memories – of Jerry, and of the case he could never put behind him.

After all these hours of all these nights over all these years, she honestly didn’t know what to believe about the facts surrounding her husband’s death. But she knew that, regardless of who pulled the trigger on Jerry’s gun, William Summer was responsible for what happened to her and her family.

The repeat she was watching of a sitcom about nothing ended, and the network moved on to a drama about police officers who solved crimes by analyzing physical evidence. Roberta changed the channel with a click of the remote control, then took another sip of vodka.

She glanced at the digital clock that sat on the top of the television. Nine o’clock. Pretty soon Ellie would be calling to check in on her. Just as she always did.

THAT SAME NIGHT, in New Iberia, Louisiana, another mother was thinking of her daughter. Evelyn Davis sat on a small settee in her art studio, next to her daughter’s best friend, Suzanne Mouton.

On further reflection, Evelyn thought, perhaps Suzanne was no longer Amy’s best friend. In fact, Suzanne may never have been Amy’s best friend at all. Suzanne had been part of Amy’s group in high school. That much she was sure of. She remembered how the other members of the group always loved to call this particular girlfriend by her full name. Suzanne – pronounced the Acadian way, Susahn – Mouton. It did have a very nice sound to it. But Suzanne Mouton had always just been one of the crowd, not one of the two or three girls who took shifts being inseparable from Amy.

The reasons Evelyn was close to Suzanne now, nearly fifteen years later, had more to do with the fact that Suzanne had been the only one of Amy’s friends to stay in Louisiana. And when Suzanne’s own mother died when she was a junior at LSU, Evelyn Davis had stepped in to help her get through it.

Amy’s trips home had already begun dwindling back in college. At the time Evelyn assumed that her daughter was just too busy with her classes at Colby to fly all the way down from Maine. But then Amy’s visits became briefer, even during breaks.

Evelyn couldn’t say she was surprised that she and her only child had grown apart. Amy had always been her father’s daughter. Like her father, she would have preferred to live in Houston. Or in San Francisco or New York for that matter. Anywhere but what she called “da buy-you.” She worked hard to avoid picking up a regional accent, sure it would hamper her once she finally escaped the land of sugar cane and gators.

And her hatred of Louisiana had always translated into resentment toward her mother. Amy knew that Evelyn was the one who insisted that the family stay in the only state she had ever known. It had been a condition when she married Hampton. Evelyn had insisted, ironically, because her own mother needed her.

Something had begun to change in Amy, however, just in the last few years. Possibly it was because she was