Dougherty’s murder. She knew Sabadish from years earlier when she lived at a home for unwed mothers where he was the chaplain. Now on the telephone he had made sexual advances, including a threat that he wanted to rape her. Sabadish said she needn’t worry about becoming pregnant because he was “sterile.”
Furious, the woman’s husband called Sabadish and confronted him, while taping the phone call. Sabadish admitted making the obscene telephone calls and sexual threats. He apologized and promised not to do it again. Chief Faragalli had obtained the tape.
When Sabadish was making his rounds on parish visitation, the chief and a detective picked him up in an unmarked car and took him to the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown, where a county detective gave him a lie detector test. The priest passed the polygraph.
After that, police turned to other suspects they considered equally compelling. A town drunk admitted he killed Carol. Later, it was discovered that the man was mentally ill, and furthermore a Bristol cop had coerced his confession. A local convicted child molester rose to the top of the list, but he proved he was in another state at the time of the murder.
At the Vidocq luncheon, the police said that Frank Dougherty could not forget how the church had shunned him and his wife after Carol’s murder. Father Sabadish refused to make eye contact with him. Neither Sabadish, Reverend Carroll, nor Monsignor Baird called on the family to comfort them. When Dougherty asked Sabadish in the church confessional, “Father, am I wrong in assuming a priest could have killed my daughter?” the priest stood up and left the confessional.
Police never questioned Sabadish again. “We had no concrete evidence to tie Sabadish to the murder, except that he was very evasive during the interrogation,” said the surviving investigator.
Shortly after the polygraph, Sabadish was quietly transferred from St. Mark’s with no explanation to parishioners. He returned months later, again without explanation from the monsignor. Five years later, he was transferred to St. William Parish in Philadelphia. Then followed more than a dozen transfers in eighteen years within the archdiocese in eastern Pennsylvania. In recent weeks, Mullane, the reporter, had tracked down Father Sabadish, now in his seventies and still employed by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a chaplain at a Montgomery County Catholic hospital. Mullane asked the aging priest if he killed Carol Ann Dougherty. Sabadish vehemently denied it, calling it “an absolute, positive lie.” He denied that he had made obscene phone calls to a Fairless Hills woman, saying, “That’s news to me,” and called police detectives “crazy.” After the newspaper stories were published he called Mullane, furious, and called him “anti-Catholic.”
Now the Bristol police were seriously considering other suspects as they reopened the investigation. The Vidocq Society urged police to test the semen, pubic hairs, and a badly smudged fingerprint left on Carol’s plastic hair band, presumably the killer’s.
After the luncheon, Fleisher left the City Tavern determined to solve the case. “It was the priest,” Fleisher said. “We all knew it was the priest.”
Within days, the Vidocq Society had formed a task force to bring the killer of Carol Ann Dougherty to justice.
• CHAPTER 34 •
WHAT I WANT TO HEAR ARE HANDCUFFS
The light in the room was storm cloud gray, and ice glistened on the sidewalks below the municipal building. A bitter north wind beat the windows of the detective division of the Lubbock Police Department. The man from Philadelphia had not enjoyed his week on the high plains of West Texas. He had sat in the police car grimly staring at cotton fields rolling under black judgment-day skies. Goose hunting country, they said.
SUPER SLEUTH CALLED TO SHED LIGHT ON BIZARRE DISAPPEARANCE.
It was the front-page story that touted his arrival, followed by a second front-page story in the
INVESTIGATOR EXPECTS TO CRACK DUNN CASE.
Walter had confidently declared that Lubbock police would soon solve the case of Dunn’s disappearance. After spending one day studying the case, interviewing suspects, and talking to police, Walter promised that the “nasty and clever” killers’ eighteen months of gloating would soon come to an end. His analysis of the murder indicated that the killers were “smart” but made “mistakes.” They unknowingly revealed their patterns to him, leaving “trails, bits and pieces” that would be their undoing.
“Success will be based on two things,” he said. “A) The case merits success, and B) I don’t like losing a case. I have a bulldog mentality, and what I want to hear are handcuffs, and I want to do it right. . . . If I were the suspect, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
Now at eight o’clock that morning in December 1992, Walter sat down with a police corporal, sergeant, and detective to discuss the Dunn case. The thin man looked fresh and energized in his blue suit, his blue eyes shining above the French tricolor pin on his lapel. Tal English, the tall, twenty-seven-year-old detective, had an aw-shucks manner that matched his sandy hair and cowboy boots; he and Walter had bonded working the case for months over the telephone. The older man had croaked, “Young man, we’re going to go into the jaws of hell and bring this case back out.” Corporal George White, distinguished-looking with gray in his dark hair, and Sergeant Randy McGuire, large and bald, sat stoically appraising the profiler. They all got along in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but the two veteran cops had not seen eye to eye with the “super sleuth” from the Vidocq Society in their previous meeting.
After the cops’ courteous Texas welcome, which Walter always appreciated, he got right to his point: They should immediately take the case to District Attorney Travis Ware and press for murder charges. Walter wanted the charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and her neighbor and lover Tim Smith, fiercely jealous of Scott, whom he believed was an accomplice.
Corporal White and Sergeant McGuire took a long look at the man from Philadelphia. The case had been a top priority for a year. Jim Dunn was a hometown boy, a hall-of-fame alumnus of local Texas Tech; his best friend was still his old college roommate W. R. Collier, president of the largest locally owned bank in Lubbock. There was great public interest in the gruesome disappearance of a prodigal son in a cloud of sex, blood, and duct tape, and the police had invested thousands of man-hours. Murders were relatively rare in the Texas city of 186,000 people, but they were reading about this one over coffee from Plainview to Dallas to Jacksonville, Florida. The police wanted nothing more than to solve it. They liked Walter, and he them—“they were all great guys”—but they just couldn’t see how a petite, charming twenty-eight-year-old woman had orchestrated a vast conspiracy of lies and cold- blooded murder.
Walter tried to convince them.
“This case is like shaking hands with smoke,” he said. “It’s a matter of you can see it, you can smell it and taste it, but it’s difficult to get your hands around it.”
Walter urged them to look at the crime scene, the killing room with blood halfway up the walls and splattered on the ceiling. They all agreed Scott Dunn had no doubt died in that room. The point of departure was that with no body and no weapon there was no case, according to the police. Without that foundation of physical evidence, it wasn’t possible to bring murder charges under Texas law, as the DA never tired of reminding them.
Walter saw it differently. “I say, OK, we don’t have a body. Its absence is a clue. Let’s use that to move forward.”
The problem, as he privately saw it, was that “cops are concrete. They think in structure. The whole investigative process is structural, and wisely so. Traditionally, you work from the inside out on a case. You work from the evidence forward. Here you don’t have a body, you don’t have the primary evidence; that’s it, end of story. So in this case one must work from the outside, the pathology, back to the crime scene.” He smiled to himself at the small irony that it was eccentric Eugene Francois Vidocq, in nineteenth-century Paris, who first had the gall to reveal broader and deeper patterns to the straight-thinking gendarmes.
“The police are correct in that what we have at the crime scene is vital,” he said to himself. “One must always remain rooted in the facts of the case, but one must think differentially, not just linearly. Unfortunately,
