Expiration Date

Literally, it was in the last box I checked. A collection of paystubs, bound together by a dirty and cracked rubber band.

Paystubs from the Adams Institute.

So this was the hospital where Grandpop had worked from about 1989 until he retired in 2003. A mental hospital.

No, not just a mental hospital. The same mental hospital where they kept Billy Derace, the man who witnesses say stabbed my father to death in a cheap dive.

My father. Grandpop Henry’s son.

How had Grandpop been allowed to work there? Surely there had to be some kind of background check for security guards at the hospital. Then I looked down at the envelope and saw the name: Henryk Wadcheck. The world knew my murdered father as Anthony Wade. No connection there. And I’m sure Grandpop hadn’t volunteered that information.

So was he just working there for the money? Or did he have a plot in mind?

Of course he had a plot in mind.

Because in 2002, he moved to the apartment one flight up from where Billy Derace grew up.

Because he had a locked medicine cabinet with a plastic bottle full of pills that would send him back in time.

Two events could be a coincidence. Not all of this.

And as I knelt in a messy pile of boxes and papers, there was a knock at my door.

Meghan didn’t say a word. She just walked in, placed a paper bag of groceries on the cherrywood desk. She glanced down at the mess on the floor, which, through her eyes, must have looked like I was building a wino-style nest for myself in the middle of the apartment. Then she reached into her oversized Kiplinger purse, pulled out a curled stack of papers and handed them to me.

“What’s all this?”

Meghan looked at me.

“Patty Glenhart was real.”

The top sheet was a photo of the original Bulletin story I’d first read back in 1972. “Girl Missing.” Same lead, same byline, same story.

The next sheet, however, was her death notice.

“Wait—she died?”

“Keep reading.”

The piece was from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and dated January 8, 1987. Patricia Anne Glenhart, twenty-seven years old, found beneath a truck two blocks from Frankford Avenue, wrapped in an old overcoat. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed thirty-seven times.

“She’s dead,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” Meghan said. “She has been for over twenty years now. Mickey, let me ask you something, and please don’t mess around with my head. Please tell me the truth.”

“Of course.”

“The day you moved here, you were joking about somebody called the Frankford Slasher. Turns out he was real.”

“I told you!”

“Do you know much about the case?”

“I grew up here, so I remember hearing a lot about it. But I also wrote a short follow-up piece for the City Press a few years ago. The murders are still unsolved, as far as the police are concerned.”

“So you’re familiar with the names of the victims.”

Another snap in my head.

“Wait—Patty Glenhart was killed by the Frankford Slasher?”

Meghan nodded.

“But it was Patricia Bennett. Her married name. But her maiden name was Glenhart.”

I flicked through the rest of the papers—which were Inquirer and Daily News accounts of the Slasher. Every article after January 1987 mentioned Patty Bennett. Meghan had highlighted the name in bright yellow.

The last piece was my own, from the City Press. It was titled “Under the El.” There was a sidebar listing the fifteen known victims. In the middle of the list was Patty Bennett’s name.

“No way.”

“You wrote the piece, Mickey. Maybe you didn’t consciously remember her name, or having read her maiden name somewhere, but your subconscious sure did. So when you started having your visions about saving some little girl, you dredged her up, and…”

“No. Not possible.”

Of course I wrote the piece. I remembered agonizing over it, because I had a simple rule about writing first- person journalism pieces: namely, don’t. But it had been the anniversary of the first Slasher victim, and I had been desperate to come up with something to fill a cover slot, and once my editor heard about it, she pretty much strong-armed me into making it a personal essay/follow-up piece. She had visions of state—maybe even national—awards; instead, it was more or less ignored except by certain Frankford business owners who called for a good month to complain.

The victims of the Frankford Slasher were considered “nobodies”—female barflies, active or retired prostitutes, or other lost souls. They hopped bars—mostly Goldie’s at Pratt Street, sometimes the Happy Tap closer to Margaret Street.

The Slasher was a few years into his work before anyone noticed the pattern. First was fifty-two-year-old Maggie Childs, who lived in Oreland, a town in Montgomery County, but was reportedly a Goldie’s regular, estranged from her husband. Her body was discovered in August 1985. Just five months later, the body of sixty-eight-year-old Carol Joyce was found on her bedroom floor, naked from the waist down, and stabbed six times, with the murder weapon still lodged in her torso. Joyce lived in South Philly, but was also a Goldie’s regular. So was sixty-four-year- old Edie Pettit, who was found stabbed to death Christmas Day 1986. Just a few weeks later, in January 1987, twenty-eight-year-old Jan White, a former go-go dancer and homeless woman who slept on the street near Goldie’s, was found beneath a truck near Dyre Street. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed forty-seven times, and wrapped in an overcoat.

Neighbors soon put pressure on the police to catch the madman responsible for the killings.

Well over a year passed before sixty-six-year-old Janet Bazell was found stabbed to death in the vestibule of her apartment building on Penn Street near Harrison. She had been out drinking in the bars under the El, trying to forget the fact that she’d been evicted from her apartment that same day, November 11, 1988. Then, on January 19, 1989, Terry Conroy, thirty, was found in her apartment on Arrott Street, just above Griscom, cut to ribbons and wearing nothing but a pair of socks.

Witnesses started to come forward; Bazell and Conroy had been seen hanging out with a young white man, barely in his twenties. Sketches were made, circulated. No arrests came of them.

With the seventh murder came a break in the case. Carol Strauss, a forty-six-year-old woman with a history of mental illness, was found stabbed thirty-six times behind a seafood shop early in the morning of April 28, 1989.

The next morning, detectives questioned a shop employee named Tyrell “Cooker” Beaumont, who casually told a friend in a bar that he knew one of the Frankford Slasher’s previous victims. He also said he was with his