The Murder Room

• CHAPTER 36 •

TAKE ME TO THE PSYCHOPATH

Lubbock police detective Tal English drove the unmarked car through the breezy Texas spring morning, with Richard Walter smoking in the passenger seat. They pulled into the parking lot of the Copper Kettle, a popular lunch spot. They were thinking takeout.

One Leisha Hamilton, to go.

The tall, dark-haired waitress saw them across the restaurant and scowled. English said, “Leisha, let’s go outside and avoid a scene.” She nodded and quietly followed them out to the car. They put her in the backseat, and Walter turned around to face her.

“It’s time for a little chat,” he said. He didn’t smile.

Four months after meeting the DA, Walter was frustrated by the case’s lack of progress. In April 1993 he returned to Lubbock, determined to “stop fucking around” and “explain the case to them.” He tried to sell the detectives once more on his idea that Leisha Hamilton was a psychopath and the primary suspect, but it was an old idea and nobody was buying. He muttered under his breath, “Gentlemen, you have no idea what you’re dealing with,” then turned to Detective English: “Young man, take me to the psychopath.” It was time to take the fight to Hamilton.

They all exchanged small talk as Hamilton got in the backseat. The death stare she’d leveled at them in the restaurant was gone. She was smiling, chatty, flipped her dark hair back off her forehead. She’d recovered composure remarkably fast.

Walter could sense the sex in the air, the flirty gestures and smiles she routinely used to entrap young men, the fluffy illusion concealing the hard, calculating mind beneath. He glared at her. With a psychopath, go straight for the kill. Don’t mess around.

“This is not a social visit, Leisha. I wish you would explain something to me. I don’t know anybody else in America who does a murder and then cleans up the crime scene afterward. That is, unless it is done in their own home. And in this case, you’re the only one who had access to that house. And you don’t have an alibi for the murder.”

“But I do have an alibi,” she protested.

“You mean you know when he died? Only the killer knows when he died.”

“I know when I found out he was missing—”

“Scott Dunn is not missing,” Walter sharply interrupted. “I don’t want to hear this charade about him being missing. It offends my sense of propriety. Scott Dunn was murdered. We’ve got that established and you’re a suspect.”

The eyes and voice now went flat as prairie and held there, unshakable. “Then I guess I don’t have an alibi.”

Walter appeared to be lost in contemplation, then stared balefully over his horn-rims.

“Leisha, I’ve noticed you seem to have a great ability to attract men, especially younger men. Now, granted I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m tired. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what they see in you. Can you explain it for me?”

A startled silence filled the car. She smiled awkwardly. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Is it because of all the sexual tricks you’ll perform for them? Because you are a sexual Disneyland?”

“I guess so.” She nodded sharply. “I’ve got to get back to work.” She opened the door, and she was gone.

English sat stunned. “Richard,” he said. “Am I mistaken, or did you just call her a dog?”

Walter grinned conspiratorially. “I thought I did.”

“But why?”

“I wanted to see how she reacted to unexpected situations, to see how quick she was in her thinking and what her game was all about. And it worked. It’s plain that her game is all about power—power and control. She’s a good little psychopath, so information is crucial to her power. I planted seeds of doubt, as well as direct information I wanted her to know, such as she is a suspect. I wanted to create some anxiety and I succeeded.”

Walter lit a Kool. “Leisha thinks she is smart enough to outwit everybody and can play a cat-and-mouse game with the police. What we must do is make her feel insignificant—unimportant. This will drive her crazy and she may well make a mistake.”

The detective nodded.

“But it won’t be easy. It’ll take time and patience. She’s very strong, very powerful. I looked in her eyes and saw she was having fun. It was a game and she was in control. I knew then without a doubt that the bitch killed him.”

Shortly after he returned to Michigan, Walter opened a package from Detective English. Out fell a single piece of white paper on which was drawn “quite intriguing original art.”

It was Hamilton’s pencil sketch of the murder scene—a crude, childlike drawing that documented the prolonged torture of Scott Dunn.

The drawing showed an empty bedroom with a wooden pallet in one corner to which was chained a stick- figure man, labeled “S.” At the bottom of the drawing was a legend or key depicting handcuffs, a needle, a knife, a gun, and a sketch of a penis and scrotum.

The middle of the drawing showed the “S” man running across the room toward an open door, with the sun shining outside promising freedom. But the “S” figure collapses before the door and dies; a ghost of “S” leaves the body.

Studying the sketch, Walter thought, Scott suffered worse than I imagined. The gun was clearly used by Leisha and perhaps a confederate to subdue the bigger, stronger Scott with the handcuffs and tie him to the pallet; the needle would have been employed to keep him doped up for forty-eight hours of torture with a knife, fists, and a blunt instrument that delivered the fatal blows to the head. The “companion ghost” next to the fallen “S” figure indicated Scott had died trying to escape, Walter said. “Furthermore, the future, through the door, is clean and unused.”

The drawing of “detached genitalia” indicates Scott suffered “sexual abuse with a dildo, or, more than likely, it was representative of emasculation,” the forensic psychologist wrote in a formal report for the police. Walter believed Scott had been cut in pieces and disposed of in a way that he would never be found.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked Detective English.

“An ex-boyfriend she took up with after Scott by the name of Karl Young. He gave it to me in a coffee shop, looking nervously over his shoulder the whole time. She scared the shit out of him. He thought she’d killed Scott and had Tim Smith clean up.”

“Of course he’s afraid,” Walter said. “This is an extremely powerful woman. She gets what she wants when she wants it, and God forbid if you get in her way.”

The drawing indicated that Hamilton had chained Scott to a pallet right where their bed had once been located. A coroner and blood-spatter expert determined, by the angle of three drops of blood on a far wall, that Scott had died from three lethal blows to the head.

It was Hamilton’s “pictorial of the murder scene, a keepsake,” Walter said.

“This is a classic,” he added. “It’s her personal pictorial diary of the murder. Rule number one is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is, until he or she stops deriving pleasure from it. Scott Dunn is dead, but for Leisha Hamilton, it isn’t over yet. She drew this to memorialize her achievement. She gains fresh pleasure each time she looks at it.”

The drawing confirmed his profile of Hamilton as a power-assertive killer, a woman who was “a user and all about power,” he said. “She has to be the top dog, the alpha dog, the bitch if you will. You don’t break up with or dismiss Leisha Hamilton. She dismisses you. I see lots of anger, rage, domination. ‘You’re going to leave me, are you? Now try and leave me, bitch.’ That sort of thing.”

Torture was a favorite method of power-assertive killers. In this case the pictured implements of torture were all “masculine symbols” employed in the PA’s goal of total physical dominance. Simply shooting Scott wouldn’t provide the necessary pleasures. “Her real payoff was the close-up use of fists and knives and whatever inflicted