The Murder Room

Leisha would never have gone to jail, Tim Smith never would have been convicted, if it wasn’t for Walter, the prosecutor said.

Smith was sentenced the next day. He faced ninety-nine years or life in prison for his involvement in Dunn’s prolonged torture, murder, dismemberment, and disposal. Hamilton had received twenty years. Walter had hated to tell Dunn, but the truth was that Hamilton could be out in less than a decade for good behavior.

Now the jury deliberated for about an hour. Timothy James Smith received no jail time at all for first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to ten years’ probation and a $10,000 fine.

Dunn was stunned. He couldn’t conceive how “Tim Smith, convicted of murdering Scott, was free to walk the streets of Lubbock” and did not have to reveal the location of Scott’s body.

Because Smith had no prior criminal record, the jury had the option of probation.

Walter was outraged.

“It would appear that the jury attempted to do God’s work of forgiveness at the sentencing,” he later wrote. “In these matters, it would seem the jury should leave God’s work to God, and do the work of the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the jury allowed Timothy James Smith to benefit unfettered from the murder for which all life has been cheapened.”

Walter was concerned about Jim Dunn.

Within days of the trial, the aggrieved father threw himself on Smith’s mercy, now that the killer was “beyond harm,” begging to Smith to reveal, even anonymously, the location of Scott’s body. “Please . . . let him have the decency of a proper burial,” he wrote. “Look at your son, who is alive, then contact me. In your heart you know the right thing to do. . . . I will be waiting for a message from you or your intermediary. Send it to Box 986, Morrisville, PA, 19067.”

Dunn also returned to taking phone calls from Leisha Hamilton, hoping to learn where his son was buried. Hamilton kept calling the grieving father from her prison cell, toying with his emotions. Dunn was a wreck. Leisha had murdered the son; now she was destroying the father.

“Stop talking to her,” Walter said, scolding him. “You’re dealing with a classic psychopath. The murder is not over with the killing. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is. The murder’s not over for her. She’s still enjoying it. Don’t feel hate toward Leisha. It weakens you. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is neutrality, ‘I don’t care.’ If you ignore her, she will lose her hold over you.

“Damn it, Jim, she got your son. Don’t let the killer take another victim.”

The quest to find his son’s body to put under the stone was destroying him.

Dunn sat quiet while Walter lit a Kool, and watched the plume of smoke disintegrate over the porch.

“But it was quite fascinating,” he said. “Here you have Leisha Hamilton, the dominating, power-driven killer, controlling and using submissive Tim Smith like a dog, seducing him into murder, setting him up to take the fall. The jury sees right through her, is repulsed by her, she goes to prison. Then you have Tim Smith, whose submissive nature makes him Hamilton’s hapless victim, using that very quality to turn the tables on the jury. He’s no less psychopathic, but he’s dreamy, poetic, and the jury falls for his charming-nice-young-Christian-man act.”

He stood and looked across the street at St. Paul’s, rising quietly now from its grove of old trees.

“I’m probably more agnostic than I am an atheist, but in any event, even if one doesn’t believe in God, in our line of work one must have substance, structure, strong faith, character.” He snuffed out the cigarette. “It used to be that people had character; now houses have character and people have personality. That won’t do. The eternal things, the good, the true, the beautiful, must be unbreakable.”

“One must have standards,” Stoud said, grinning.

“One must.”

“One should.”

“I do,” Walter said, “and mine are quite low.” They were laughing now.

Walter laughed himself into a coughing fit as he walked into the house.

• CHAPTER 45 •

THE DESCENT

The thin man sat in a wing chair with his hard green pack of Kools, battered metal ashtray, and ceramic coffee cup resting on a walnut side table from nineteenth-century Lyon. The coffee cup, a gift from an admiring Midwestern homicide squad, was inscribed “When Your Life Ends, Our Work Begins.” The parlor, dim at midday, was crowded with antiques; the front door was attended by the bust of a French knight, a chevalier of the last century, lit by an enormous red Chinese paper lantern.

The afternoon was quiet but for the ticking of the grandfather clock and Walter spinning the triple-digit combination on the steel-ribbed, aircraft-aluminum briefcase. It was the classic 1940s-style Zero Halliburton, the near-indestructible model that protects the U.S. president’s nuclear codes and red button.

“This is strictly proprietary,” Walter said as the double-bolt lock sprung and the case hissed open. “Not to be discussed outside this room.”

“I saw that attache on Mission: Impossible,” Stoud teased. “I don’t believe it’s for country gentlemen.” He knew the classic Zero was fashionable with spies, federal agents, and pretentious film noir directors—but that Walter, with justification, used it to guard information that had proved extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.

“Information can be harmful when you’re not ready for it,” Walter said. “Dostoevsky said there were some ideas you could eat, and some that ate you. These are devouring ideas.”

Nested in the rich leather interior, protected from dust and moisture by the neoprene gasket-sealed case, was a stack of photographs of the corpse of Terri Lee Brooks with the knife sticking out of her throat. Under the stack were simple manila files.

Walter’s subtypes.

He and Bob Keppel, the famous Washington State investigator, had spent years refining their grand theory of murder investigation. They would soon publish in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology a paper, “Profiling Killers: A Revised Classification Model for Understanding Sexual Murder,” that would be internationally hailed as a landmark analysis and working system of murder investigation. Walter since the 1980s had been lecturing about murderer personality traits to detectives, prosecutors, and forensic specialists all around the world, from Hong Kong to London to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

It was a dream as old as the human condition, to understand the heart of darkness. To see the broader patterns. Walter hated to admit it, but his method was perfectly described in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in London in 1887, in the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who explains to his roommate, Dr. John Watson, what a “consulting detective” does: “. . . we have lots of Government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault they come to me. . . . They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able . . . to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.”

In analyzing thousands of murders, Walter and Keppel discovered the most violent murders, sex murders, were invariably committed by one of four personality types. These distinct personalities inevitably expressed themselves, could not help but express themselves, their traits, desires, and learning curve in the murder itself. The crime scene was a vast canvas; the detective had merely to read the signature. Or, as G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1910, “The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic.”

The thin man returned from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee, and Walter and Stoud both lit fresh cigarettes. Shortly after noon, they began the descent.

The first personality type of murderers identified by Walter and Keppel was the most common, the power- assertive or PA killer. Walter nicknamed this type the John Wayne–style killer. He bristles with machismo, muscles, tattoos, guns, girlie magazines, a pickup truck. He preens over his automobile. Among his signatures, he strikes massively to the head to overwhelm his victim, much like the first big bite of the great white shark. He disposes of his victim like trash, his power needs fulfilled. This is a man of ironclad principles (no character, but firm principles).