family estate in New Jersey, the gated compound with mansion, Olympic-size pool with brick bathhouses for men and women, golf course, boat slip on the lake. “She had this fur coat, really nice expensive fur coat, and I made love to her in it in the living room of her parents’ house one day. I love doing it anywhere, over the kitchen table, not just with her. I like spontaneous combustions.”
Bender had a theory that the source of his creativity and happiness was following his heart’s desires. Bender was convinced that once artists lost touch with their uninhibited lust for life, they fell out of step with the dance of the universe. He feared he would lose his ability to hear the dead, his intuitive mastery of forensic art. He had a finely tuned sense of The Balance.
“So let me get this straight,” Walter said. “You can’t be a great artist unless you can sleep with whomever you want.”
“Well, The Balance is important to my work.”
“Right.”
But then Laura did something no other girlfriend of Bender’s had ever done. She became extremely possessive of him. “She wanted me to leave Jan and Joan and drop any other girlfriends. Said she didn’t like Jan and Joan.” Joan didn’t like Laura much at that point, either. Jan was furious; her husband had finally reeled in a woman who—God forbid—wanted Bender all to himself, and she was starting to think,
Bender brooded across the Pacific about his imperiled marriage. But at Adelaide, the first stop, he began to feel better. He couldn’t afford the hotel room Walter had booked for him, so the profiler agreed to share a room. It didn’t bother him in the least that the room had no heat. Meanwhile, Walter was coming down with pneumonia, which made him more annoyed than usual with his traveling companion.
In Sydney, Bender was again bursting with optimism. Even Jan had agreed the trip was a great career opportunity. After the List triumph, he’d been looking for bigger gigs with the feds, Interpol, and Scotland Yard, and now here he was lecturing on criminal personality profiles and crime scene assessment on a program with Ressler, whom he’d been eager to get to know. Bender spoke on the first day of the conference to the prestigious Association of Australasian and Pacific Area Police Medical Officers. He was a big hit and made a great impression on Ressler. Then he told Walter he was headed to Bondi Beach. Walter reminded him it was a four-day forensic conference. But Bender said he couldn’t stand being around “a bunch of fuddy-duddies at a conference” when he could hang out at a famous topless beach.
Bender sat on the sands looking out at the dramatic sweep of the Sydney beach. He was in paradise: The sun was high, the bikinis cut low, and he had three whole days, all expenses paid, to work on his tan. He talked to everyone who went by—about the shark net, the killer riptide, the hermit in the rocky cave, the record number of bikinis. (Bondi Beach holds the Guinness World Record for the largest swimsuit photo shoot, of 1,010 bikini-clad women.) Soon he became known as “that famous American artist” and “the guy who caught John List.” He met a lot of cute women. Things were looking up.
On the third day of the conference, he came back to the hotel to find a message from Philadelphia. “Your wife rang!!!” read the note at the front desk. “At 4:07 P.M. . . . the marshals’ office rang her to let you know they have caught Nauss. He apparently was living in suburbia with a wife and children and they knew nothing about him.”
Jubilant, Bender told Walter the exciting news. “Rich, they caught him in Michigan, just like you said they would. And he was clean-shaven, just like I said.”
“This is good,” Walter said.
Bender said he needed to get back to the United States immediately. Walter said he understood, thinking to himself,
“I told them he was in Michigan years ago,” Walter sniffed.
The tip led marshals to Luna Pier, a small town on Lake Erie an hour south of Detroit, and a man who went by the name Richard Ferrer. Nauss, thirty-eight, had taken the alias from the name of a cell mate back in Graterford. He was living a quiet life in Luna Pier with a new wife and three young sons in a ranch house with three picture windows overlooking Lake Erie.
Marshals had pieced together his trail of deception.
The year after his escape, a gentlemanly, charming, solidly built Nauss, then thirty-two, met and married Toni Ruark, thirty-seven, a single mother and government clerk in Detroit. “Rick” introduced himself as a lonely orphan, divorced, an investor, the owner of fourteen lucrative rental properties, who had “moved to Michigan to try to get his life together.” When he told his life story—orphaned with five siblings after his father died in a car accident—his friends in Luna Pier said they felt so bad for him they didn’t press him for details.
Having grown up in an upper-middle-class home in suburban Philadelphia, it was easy for Nauss to shave his heavy biker’s beard, cut his hair short, and fit right into the middle-class town. “Rick Ferrer” was a devoted husband and father, and loved to take his buddies fishing on his twenty-seven-foot boat. The lonely town of 1,500 had only four police officers, who considered him an upstanding citizen.
“When she met him, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven he was so nice,” Toni’s father said. “I liked him, too.”
Though he had no job in Michigan, Rick cultivated the image of an easygoing, successful tradesman around town. He wore his trademark baseball cap, chinos, and long-sleeve flannel shirts (always long-sleeve, no matter what the weather) as he drove his pickup truck with the toolbox he used for repairs on his properties. Occasionally he took trips out of town and came home with rent money of $2,000 or $3,000. He bought a beachfront camp up in Brimley, Michigan, on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, for a vacation home, and started selling off the extra land in lots. Life was good.
At 8 P.M. Tuesday, Halloween Eve, Rick and Toni and the kids were driving home in the Chevy Suburban, still planning for the trick-or-treaters. Toni had fixed the kids’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes, carved pumpkins for the yard, hung a paper ghost in the window, and strewn tiny lighted pumpkins in a tree by the front door. Until the moment carloads of U.S. Marshals, guns drawn, surrounded the Suburban, she had no idea who her husband was.
The marshals handcuffed the docile, solidly built Nauss in front of his children. Then they handcuffed Toni to keep her under control, though she would not be charged. As Toni stood in shock, a state police sergeant pulled down Nauss’s plaid shirt. And there, extending almost from the shoulder to the elbow, was Nauss’s trademark tattoo, an enormous parrot. The parrot was crucial to confirming his identity. “Some of his tattoos had been altered, but not this one,” said Dennis Matulewicz of the U.S. Marshals’ office in Philadelphia. “He had a special fondness for the parrot.”
The parrot told a tale—of leading Pennsylvania’s most violent motorcycle gang, rape, murder, dismemberment, and prison escape—that none of his new family or friends could believe.
Looking at his wife and children, Nauss said, “Sorry. This is it.”
“He’s a changed man,” Toni Ferrer said as her life unraveled. “At least from what they tell me. He never beat me. He never beat the kids.” There was no Richard Ferrer, no investment properties, no rents to collect. A marshal in Detroit said he was a “classic Jekyll and Hyde,” a charmer who killed one woman and fooled another. Toni thought she’d found happiness only to find out she was a cover. “They just wonder when he’s coming back,” she said of her children. “I just told them the truth.”
Large amounts of cash were found in Nauss’s house, along with a number of false IDs. The marshals believed that Nauss had continued to work with his partner Vorhauer, probably in drug manufacture and distribution. The Detroit region was known for nearly two hundred biker gangs that would have helped the escaped fugitives resettle, they said, and surely it was more than coincidence that Luna Pier was only a hundred and ten miles south of Yale,
