The Murder Room

According to accounts in the Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dickson had been a suspect all along, but police never had enough evidence to arrest him. They decided to take a fresh look at the cold case but weren’t getting far until “investigators learned of his alleged foot fetish and linked it to the fact that Wilson’s sneakers and socks were missing.” For eight years, investigators thought the missing footwear was important, “but they didn’t know why. Then, in 1993, police said they found a clue in the files of the U.S. Army.”

Dickson had been arrested and court-martialed for the theft of women’s sneakers on an Army base in Korea in 1979. Army Sergeant Gwendolyn Garrett-Jackson, who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, was prepared to testify that Dickson broke into her quarters on the Korean base and stole her white sneakers, video camera, and other belongings. Based on the Army court-martial, police obtained warrants to search Dickson’s apartment on City Avenue and his storage bin at the Philadelphia Navy base.

In both locations, police seized more than a hundred pairs of women’s white sneakers, all used, and confiscated seventy-seven videotapes of women wearing white sneakers. The tapes were pornographic, including sex scenes of women in white sneakers, and women fondling other women’s feet. There were shots of Dickson’s Florida vacation to Disney World, with the camera trained on his female partner’s feet, and a scene in a fast-food restaurant where the camera was focused on women wearing white sneakers. There was a home-shopping commercial for a cross-country ski machine showing a woman on the machine wearing white sneakers, and a naked store mannequin wearing white Keds.

Dickson’s foot fetish was not a harmless fetish, the prosecution said, but a sexual deviancy that led him to psychopathic behavior. Three years after Wilson’s murder, police said, Dickson was fired from a maintenance job at the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company after admitting he had written a love letter to a female chemist, asking her to leave him her sneakers. Three other women were prepared to testify they believed Dickson had broken into their apartments to steal their white sneakers.

Dickson’s ex-wife told police Dickson “was obsessed by, and drew sexual satisfaction from, women’s feet, sneakers, and socks . . . when she came home from work, tired and wearing sweaty sneakers, her husband removed her shoes and rubbed, kissed, and fondled her feet and toes.” She saw him masturbate in their home while watching aerobics tapes of attractive young women exercising in white socks and sneakers. When she found other women’s sneakers in her closets on several occasions, her husband said “he was giving them to Goodwill.”

Police had shattered Dickson’s alibi for the murder. He claimed he’d been talking to his girlfriend on the telephone at the time of the murder and “forgot” to check on Wilson and take her to her car. Yet the woman, now his estranged wife, testified that Dickson phoned her only once that evening, for fifteen minutes between midnight and one in the morning, when Wilson was alive. She also testified that she received a frantic phone call from Dickson saying, “Felicia, you’ve got to help me. You’re my alibi. You’ve got to help me.”

Reached at her home in Woodbury, New Jersey, Dorothy Wilson, Deborah’s mother, said the family felt “very, very thankful . . . it’s been eight and a half years. . . . We just can’t say enough for the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney.”

A Drexel spokesman said the university was “gratified” by the “break in the long-standing Deborah Wilson case.” Police credited a grand jury for recommending Dickson’s arrest on murder charges after an eighteen-month investigation. The police homicide special investigations unit and the district attorney’s office investigated the case extensively. Chief of Detectives Richard Zappile said he “feels very sorry for the family of the victim and we are glad that this case has finally been resolved.”

The Daily News said “it was not clear why the old murder case was reopened, although the special homicide investigations unit periodically goes back to take a fresh look at unsolved slayings.” The Wilson family hired a private detective to work on the case, police said.

The Vidocq Society was not mentioned in any of the stories. Nor was the investigative luncheon at the Downtown Club, or any individual VSM.

“Let’s remember we’re consulting detectives,” Walter said, “not crime-solvers. That’s what the police do. We’ve done our job.”

“It’s just like The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” Fleisher said. Walter glowered at him.

Fleisher ignored him. Sherlock Holmes, he said, was accused by the police of stealing credit for solving the theft of an important naval treaty from the Foreign Office.

“His reply is a classic. ‘On the contrary, out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine.’ ”

“That’s us,” Bender said.

“I don’t have any problem with it,” Fleisher said. “We’re territorial and tribal animals. It’s a very, very natural phenomenon. I saw it in the government all the time, squads competing for cases like children with sibling rivalries, agents competing with each other. It’s prize envy.”

“The fact is, we can’t work for the approval of others,” Walter said.

“There’s a better way to say this,” Bender said, raising a shot glass of vodka.

“Virtue is its own reward.” Fleisher had a lopsided grin.

“Stoli is its own reward.” The sculptor threw back the shot and smacked the empty glass on the bar.

Two years later, in December 2005, David Dickson Jr., thirty-five, would be convicted of the second-degree murder of Deborah Lynn Wilson, the twenty-year-old math major at Drexel University, so he could steal and sniff her white Reeboks and socks.

A jailhouse snitch told the court that Dickson had confessed “the whole story” of the murder to him in prison, where Dickson was known as “Dr. Scholl.” Inmate Jay Wolchansky, serving thirty to sixty years for a string of burglaries, said that Dickson told him he had asked Wilson for a date, but the student rejected him. During his late-night rounds on November 30, 1984, Dickson, a martial arts expert, attacked her in a basement classroom by grabbing her hair and hitting her on the head.

As she fell to the ground, Dickson, who once boasted of his ability in ligature strangulation, told Wolchansky that he choked her with one hand. She fell unconscious and he removed her sneakers and socks, smelled the sneakers and rubbed her feet. When she groaned awake, Wilson choked her to death. Then he “had his way” with her feet, rubbing them against his face.

Dickson had said he killed Wilson because she “deserved it, and he had a fetish for white tennis shoes.” He told Wolchansky that he kept the sneakers for about a year “and would masturbate with them from time to time.” A psychiatrist testified that Dickson kept women’s white sneakers in plastic bags to preserve the smell for his fantasies.

Wolchansky, thirty-three, denied he was in line to receive any reduction in his term for his testimony. “It bugs me that people do that [sniff sneakers]. I’m not a violent man. . . . To know how that lady was killed, Miss Wilson, disturbs me. I pray for her every night.”

The testimony perfectly matched Walter’s profile of a power-reassurance killer, a Gentleman Rapist type lost in a dark fantasy world, an illusionist who explodes in rage when his fairy tale shatters. He’s imagining that the victim will fall in love with him at his approach but “he knows goddamn well in reality the chances of that, the chances of him ever even getting a hard-on, are very slim.” Wilson was “ just shoes and socks to him.” When she fought back, it was a power loss. “He took what he wanted and got power reassurance. In his mind, he triumphed.”

Dickson said he was innocent. He told the court he enjoyed sniffing women’s feet but said he never used violence to enjoy his fetish.

Common Pleas judge Juanita Kidd Stout sentenced Dickson to a mandatory life sentence.

Deborah’s parents, Dorothy and Joseph Wilson, said they went to their daughter’s grave and told her the news. “The wound has been closed,” said Dorothy Wilson. “It’s settled. Maybe she can rest now.”

PART FOUR

BATTLING MONSTERS