For instance, if he’s raping and strangling a woman and she suddenly dies, he pulls out hurriedly because “he doesn’t want cops to think he’s a pervert,” Walter said. “Only a pervert would fuck a corpse.”
“Leisha Hamilton is a classic female PA,” Walter continued. “Scott Dunn unwittingly involved himself in an intolerable insult to power, and the PA annihilated him and disposed of him to sate her power need.”
Tim Smith, her collaborator in the murder, represented the seemingly gentler second type, the power- reassurance killer. He’s the Caspar Milquetoast killer, Walter said, lost in his own imagination. Instead of a brute grab for power, the PR killer achieved power through fantasy. This was the high school geek who skittered along the sidewalk robed in black, and turned horror movies into reality. This was the Gentleman Rapist who fantasized a strange woman was smitten with him, assaulted her with the line “Here I am at last, baby, open your wings,” Walter said, and flew into a murderous rage when “she let him know he wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread.” Unlike the John Wayne type, who scrupulously cleans the crime scene to avoid detection, this killer leaves a mess. Satiating the fantasy and rage is all that matters. James Patterson employed this type in his thriller novels, featuring characters such as Casanova and the Gentleman Caller in
It was early evening, and Walter was sipping a glass of wine; Stoud’s thick hand held a can of beer.
For half an hour repartee and ragged laughter had penetrated a blue haze of smoke that drifted toward the crown moldings, as
“It’s an anger killing,” Stoud said. “All the violence, the percussion.”
“Indeed. This is darker, moving downward on the scale.”
It was the third type, the anger-retaliatory or AR killer, the first personality type to begin to take pleasure in the killing beyond the simple satisfaction of power. Stalking the victim from a distance, like predator chasing prey, and covering the victim’s face were two important AR signatures. Walter called the AR the O. J. Simpson–type killer.
“Although of course,” Walter said that evening, “we know that O. J. is an innocent man.” Stoud chuckled.
“This is classic AR, absolutely classic,” Walter said, “followed by a clumsy attempt, after the murder was done, to stage the crime as a robbery.”
The first sign of anger and passion was overkill, he said, as if Brooks had nine lives and the killer tried to extinguish them all. Next was the killer’s choice of intimate, close-up weapons—a knife, a lead pipe, and as an asphyxiation device, his bare hands. “If you and I have a dispute over my salary, and I decide to kill you, I’ll run and get my gun—it’s a power dispute; the killing can be clean and more emotionally remote,” Walter said. “But if it’s an affair of the heart, a betrayal, the murderer needs percussion, the cutting, stabbing, and beating, to achieve gratification.”
The AR killer’s piece de resistance is to conceal the victim’s eyes. The killer of Terri Brooks did it with a plastic bag.
“In hundreds of cases I’ve looked at, an anger-retaliatory type will never allow the victim to view egress,” Walter said. “It’s a final expression of rage. A romantic relationship gone wrong is by far the most likely probability here. It’s the most logical because the overwhelming feature of the crime is the specialized—if you please, identifiable passion—and when you generally have passion, you have to have a reason for that passion, and sex is probably the most common one.”
Walter quickly developed a profile of the killer. “He’s an underachiever, but not without charm she finds quite appealing. She’s a nice strong woman, all the things he likes. He likes that tension back and forth, she allows him to be the immature little boy who never has to grow up. When she tires of his limits, in truth he’s a user and a loser, she thinks she’s ending her problem by getting rid of him, telling him to go peddle his papers, but now she inadvertently has signed her own death warrant because she’s no longer going to be there for him to use.”
He took a sip of wine. “Remember, with the AR the relationship isn’t over until they say it’s over. He’s quite pathological about it. Whether she wants to break it off or not, she doesn’t realize the fact of the matter is, he’s going to continue. He’s a parasite to her and has been all along, it just takes a more urgent, darker form. The coup de grace was ‘I don’t want you.’ When she cuts him off, he can’t stand it; that’s the justification. He feels righteously indignant. She has done him harm, therefore he has a right to kill her, therefore he hasn’t any guilt.”
The killer, Walter predicted, would be a low achiever in his late thirties, unkempt, stuck in the old neighborhood, working at a menial job, living with his mother. Walter’s profile explained why Terri Brooks let her killer in a locked door after 1:30 in the morning.
“She knew and trusted him,” Walter said. “It was her boyfriend.”
The fourth type of killer he was not prepared to discuss. “It’s the most complex and diabolical, the most difficult type of killer to catch, the greatest of human nightmares. It’s the black hole at the end of the continuum.”
• CHAPTER 46 •
IN THE WORLD WHICH WILL BE RENEWED
Riding through the stone gate of Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in his black sedan, Fleisher was happy the boy was moving up in the world. Around him were the immense tombs and obelisks of the great and notable: Charles Duryea, who invented the gasoline engine; gospel singer Marion Williams; Roaring Twenties tennis star Bill Tilden. The mausoleums of the wealthy towered over the simple stones and crosses of the masses. Through the good offices of undertaker Craig Mann, whose father buried the boy the first time, Fleisher and the Vidocq Society had secured from the Ivy Hill cemetery prime real estate near the gate for the boy, a place among the favored dead.
It was November 11, 1998, Veterans Day. The morning sky was dark and brooding. It had rained all night on the hills of the nineteenth-century graveyard, darkening the stones and cenotaphs. The old detectives in dark coats and fedoras gathered around the fresh hole in the ground. Among them were Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen; the young policemen of the winter of 1957 were disguised now as old men. A large black headstone, carved with a lamb symbolizing innocence, stood on the prominent new gravesite. The new burial plot and stone were donated, and the Vidocq Society paid for the reburial at Ivy Hill.
The small casket was a pearly white with a beveled lid. Weinstein, who carried the body to the police car long ago, now joined Fleisher in bearing the coffin from the hearse to the grave. A bag-pipe wailed “Going Home,” the old Negro spiritual:
Fleisher placed the casket on the hydraulic platform. Now the boy lay as close to the sun as he had been
