He was a bad guy, in other words, for a woman to be introduced to by one of her best friends. That’s what happened to Anna Mary Duval, a retired New Jersey office worker who’d moved to Arizona. Her new friend Martini persuaded her to put $25,000 in a hot real estate investment, and told her to meet him in Philadelphia in the fall of 1977 to complete the deal. Martini kept Duval’s money and killed her, too—his version of a real estate closing.
Now, in 1997, twenty years later, Martini finally admitted to killing Duval and was convicted of her murder— brought to justice by the art and vision of Frank Bender.
“This guy Martini is the worst,” Bender said, “except for maybe Vorhauer. He’s too far out there even for the movies—sort of
“Richard, as a psychologist, how would you handle this type of criminal?” Fleisher asked.
Walter sneered in disgust. “Seven cents’ worth of lead.”
When Duval was introduced to the forty-four-year-old, Bronx-born Martini, the brother of one of her best friends, she was impressed. She was apparently unaware that he had served federal time for hijacking a truckload of women’s underwear in New Jersey, or that the FBI considered him one of the “nastiest” criminals in America. She couldn’t have known—not even the police did—that Martini also had been on the FBI payroll for more than a decade, tipping off the bureau about hijacked trucks in New York and New Jersey.
In October 1977, Duval flew through Chicago to Philadelphia, where Martini picked her up at the airport. He introduced her to another gentleman, an off-duty policeman, quietly sitting in the backseat behind her. Minutes later, the man in the backseat pulled out a handgun and pumped three bullets into the back of Duval’s head, execution-style. The two men dumped the body near the airport. Martini later told police that the shooter was his apprentice. He was teaching the cop how to “work on a contract, you know, killing people.”
The Duval murder sent Martini on a wild killing spree. He was the lead suspect in at least four murders for which he was never charged, including the shooting deaths of a cousin and his former son-in-law, and the shooting and stabbing of his aunt and uncle Catherine and Raymond Gebert in their Atlantic City home (Martini was awarded $175,000 as the benefactor of his aunt’s estate).
By the fall of 1988, Martini was running from the law and desperate for cash. He was nursing a $500-a-day cocaine habit, being sued for divorce, and had recently lost his longtime employment with the FBI because of his “dishonesty with the bureau,” according to court records. In October in Arizona he shot and killed his drug supplier and her companion. Three months later, with his girlfriend-accomplice Therese Afdahl, he kidnapped Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse executive Irving Flax at gun-point. Martini, cleverly eluding an FBI trap, extorted $25,000 from Flax’s wife for his safe return, and put three bullets in Flax’s head anyway. Finally arrested in a nearby hotel, Martini was convicted in 1990 for the kidnapping-murder. He was sentenced to New Jersey’s death row, where he was also convicted of Duval’s murder, and given a concurrent sentence of life in prison for killing her.
“Duval’s family said in court they were happy about the conviction and sentence,” Bender said. “They felt it showed their mother’s life had worth.”
“Frank, you are truly amazing,” Fleisher said. “What you do for law enforcement can’t be duplicated.”
That spring of 1997 was a season of triumphs for the Vidocq Society. At the April 18 luncheon in the Downtown Club, a gruesome image appeared over the white tablecloths: The decayed corpse of a twenty-seven- year-old woman lay between hedgerows in a remote part of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, apparently strangled to death. The case had languished with the Pennsylvania State Police for six years. Walter and other VSMs picked a prime suspect before dessert. “It is not, in this case, rocket science,” Walter said.
The victim’s twenty-four-year-old live-in boyfriend was a pizza deliveryman with no criminal record. But he had abused and threatened the victim, and drew additional attention to himself with his unusual nickname, “Ted Bundy.” It was one of many truth-too-strange-for-Hollywood moments in the Murder Room, and as it happened, a herd of Hollywood types was at the round tables listening.
They later were escorted to Frank Bender’s studio, where they ogled the artist’s unique collection of the living and the dead. The producers took the Vidocq founders to Le Bec-Fin, the renowned French restaurant where dinner for two can cost $700, and wooed them for their life story rights. Walter, who hated to be sold anything, found the process disconcerting.
“Kevin Spacey will play you,” a producer told him as a limousine whisked them through the Philadelphia night. “He’ll make a great, great American detective.”
Walter blinked in astonishment. “That’s wonderful! That’s truly grand! Who’s Kevin Spacey?”
“You . . . you don’t go to the movies?”
“Oh, no, my dear boy. I can’t stand the sound of popcorn being chewed.”
Four days later, Fleisher, Bender, and Walter celebrated as Jersey Films, owned by Danny DeVito, offered $1.3 million for the society’s movie rights. Before long, DeVito was inviting Bender to Hollywood for a party, and Robert De Niro, it was reported, was an unabashed Bender fan. The artist’s friends shuddered imagining the possibilities of Bender’s social life in Hollywood.
By May, retired FBI agent Robert Ressler, VSM, was touring to promote his new bestselling book,
Ressler had spent two days interviewing the gay cannibal convicted of murdering seventeen men and boys and eating from their remains. He was sickened by Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment. Three heads in a freezer, one in the refrigerator, hands in a cooking pot. No food in the apartment—just a chain saw for butchering, vials to drink blood. Dahmer had drugged and tortured his victims and told them, “I’m going to eat your heart,” drilled holes in their skulls, and poured in battery acid to make them sex-slave zombies.
Yet Ressler surprisingly came away from his meeting with the killer feeling “only empathy for the tormented and twisted person who sat before me” who said he killed and ate his visitors to overcome loneliness. Dahmer was insane, Ressler said, and deserved life in a mental hospital, not his prison sentence of nearly a thousand years. He testified in Dahmer’s defense.
Walter was horrified by his friend’s view. Walter insisted that Dahmer was a sane, cold psychopath who must be held accountable. In all but a very few criminal cases, Walter said, “People make choices. If you deny them that ability, you take away their humanity and that of everyone around them, including the victim.”
Ressler had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood as John Wayne Gacy. When Ressler refused to attend the serial killer’s execution, Gacy cursed him, saying he would haunt the FBI agent from the grave. Though Walter was skeptical of Ressler’s account, there were few people not moved by Ressler’s story that he had fallen asleep in a hotel room in Houston when he was awakened by an immensely powerful unseen force that was holding him down so he couldn’t move or breathe. As he broke free with a desperate strength, he heard the TV on in the background—CNN reporting that John Wayne Gacy had just been executed.
“How does one avoid becoming the victim of a serial killer?” Fleisher asked in a rave review of the book in the
Fleisher was proudest of Vidocq Society Members’ work on major murder cases. Renowned forensic dentist and VSM Haskell Askin made headlines by providing the crucial testimony that led to the conviction of repeat violent sexual predator Jesse Timmendequas in the brutal sex murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton, New Jersey, on July 29, 1994. Kanka’s death inspired the creation of Megan’s Law, a varied network of community laws requiring police to provide information about neighborhood sexual predators. In testimony on May 17, 1997, Askin matched bite marks on the defendant’s palm to the young girl’s teeth, evidence that so excited one juror he “punched the air with his fist and loudly clicked his tongue,” a reporter said. The juror was relieved of his duty, but Timmendequas was convicted and sentenced to death.
VSM Barbara Cohan-Saavedra, an assistant U.S. attorney, successfully prosecuted Soviet spy Robert Lipka, a U.S. National Security Agency employee in the 1960s who pled guilty to photographing top-secret documents with miniature cameras and stuffing others in his pants and under his hat to sell to KGB agents for $27,000. Lipka was sentenced to eighteen years in jail.
The multitalented Cohan-Saavedra, a jewelry artist and pastry chef, helped persuade Fleisher to add another annual dinner celebration to the Vidocq Society calendar—July 14, Bastille Day. Fleisher thought it a splendid idea. “Vidocq’s spirit of redemption lives in the Vidocq Society,” he said. “How better than to celebrate that famous day in
