The Murder Room

Alfred Scott Keefe. “Son of a gun,” Cloud said.

Finding nothing on the police department computer, he called back Gaughan at the Vidocq Society. Gaughan and Fleisher ran the name “Alfred Scott Keefe” of Warminster, Pennsylvania, the town where Terri Brooks was living when she was killed.

“Alfred Scott Keefe” in Warminster was a hit. He was in his thirties, with a clean record except for a minor offense, driving under the influence.

Reading back through the case file, he found Keefe’s name. The police had interviewed Terri’s friends about Keefe fourteen years ago, and uncovered a story that made them suspicious. Terri Brooks and Alfred Scott Keefe were engaged to marry that summer. Two days before her death, Brooks and Keefe made a deposit on a honeymoon trip to Hawaii. Brooks was planning to buy a wedding dress in a few days. Yet even as they went through the motions, their relationship was tense, her friends said. Brooks was getting cold feet. Keefe was angry at her for leaving a better-paying job to seek advancement with the Marriott Corporation. He was obsessed with the fear that she was seeing someone else, and was threatening to break off their engagement. To the police at the time, a spurned lover had a passable motive, but they had no evidence implicating Keefe.

Sergeant Cloud learned that Keefe had stayed in the area. He had married and had a child, and was separated from his wife. He had a menial job in a local pizza parlor, and had moved back into the same family home he occupied while dating Brooks. Keefe was living with his mother.

Sergeant Cloud spoke with Walter about his profile. An intriguing detail jumped out at Walter from the old police file. An hour before the murder, Alfred Scott Keefe’s pickup truck had been seen in a parking lot next to Roy Rogers. Unique among the personality subtypes, the anger-retaliatory killer stalked his prey. “From a distance, the AR builds and reaffirms his rage,” Walter said. “When he begins to close the distance, the commitment to kill has been made.”

“Congratulations,” Walter told Cloud. “You’ve found your killer.”

In September 1998, Sergeant Cloud noted a significant fact in Keefe’s DUI, his only offense on record. When Keefe was stopped while driving under the influence, on the front seat of the car was a pack of cigarettes.

Keefe was a smoker; Newport Filters.

Thanks to the forensic savvy of VSM and medical examiner Hal Fillinger, who had performed the autopsy on Brooks fifteen years earlier, the police had DNA samples of the killer. Fillinger had carefully saved the hairs on Brooks’s clothing, and the skin lodged under her fingernails during her desperate fight for life, having no way of knowing how useful the genetic material could be fifteen years later. The material contained the DNA of a male human, but was it the genetic material of Alfred Scott Keefe?

Early one morning in October, Keefe walked out of his mother’s house in the one hundred block of Horseshoe Lane in Warminster Township—the historic burg where William Penn signed his treaty with the Indians—left a bag of garbage on the sidewalk, and returned inside. He was unaware that Warminster had been alerted not to pick up his trash that morning. Falls Township, twenty miles away on the Delaware River, would be providing the service.

Officer Nelson Whitney, who had been watching, quietly drove an unmarked car up to the curb on Horseshoe Lane, grabbed the garbage bag, and drove away. Back at the station, he and Sergeant Cloud were pleased to find a treasure in Keefe’s trash.

It was a cigarette butt. A Newport Filter.

They sent it to the lab to test for the presence of DNA in dried saliva.

Walter chuckled when he heard. “Maybe cigarettes are bad for your health after all.”

• CHAPTER 48 •

INTERROGATION

Alfred Scott Keefe, a skinny man with nervous dark eyes, was sitting in a windowless interrogation room the size of a storage closet. The cops had taken him from the pizza parlor and he smelled faintly of mozzarella cheese, cigarettes, and body odor. He was seated in a hard wooden chair, with his back literally against the wall. Two pneumograph tubes crossed his chest. A cardio cuff clamped his arm. Galvanic skin electroplates pinched his fingers. The large shadows of Vidocq Society Members Bill Fleisher and Nate Gordon, sumo wrestlers in suits and two of the best polygraph examiners and interrogators in the world, were very close.

Keefe had volunteered to come in from his job making pizzas that afternoon to answer questions to clear himself. He’d agreed to take the lie-detection test. But now his whole body was vibrating as if the scientific instruments were medieval irons holding him fast, and the cool, mechanically repeated questions the incessant falling of a whip.

Gordon asked him if he had killed his fiancee, Terri Lee Brooks.

Gordon could make a man who had something to hide very nervous. Sitting directly in front of the wan Keefe, Gordon was a hulking man, bald with a white fringe of beard, a disarmingly high, quick voice, and hyperalert blue eyes. He had the bulk of an offensive lineman, a black belt in karate, a master’s degree in criminology, was credited with numerous innovations in lie detection, and published in scholarly journals like Radiology articles such as “Brain Mapping of Deception and Truth Telling About an Ecologically Valid Situation: An MRI and Polygraph Investigation.” He began his forensic lectures by shredding conventional assumptions with razor logic; he ended them by splitting a brick in half with his head.

Fleisher could play “good guy” to Gordon’s “bad guy” if necessary. Fleisher could play it any way you wanted. With the FBI and Customs, Fleisher had literally written the federal book on detecting lies in the human face. Seated on Keefe’s right, the Vidocq commissioner was dapper in his brown suit and neat gray Old Testament beard, leaning forward into the green glowing monitor of a computer, where the polygraph test whirred and dipped its digital judgments.

Were you engaged to Terri Lee Brooks? Did you cause the death of Terri Brooks? Do you know who killed Terri Brooks? Did you use a knife to kill Terri Lee Brooks? Where were you when Terri Brooks was killed? Gordon pounded the same question from a dozen different angles; Keefe volleyed back with terse, controlled denials. But the rest of his body was telling a different story.

For a guy who claimed to have done nothing wrong in his life but skimp on the pepperoni, his sympathetic nervous system was going haywire. His head shook like a bobble-head doll’s. His hands were sweating like he was on a bad first date. Nothing was clipped to his eyebrows, which exploited their freedom by twitching.

Fleisher stared at the computer screen and quietly shook his head, a small, controlled motion of amazement. Keefe’s physiological responses were charted immediately as waves moving across the green-glowing monitor, rising and falling like a miniature emerald sea. Deception all over the lot, he thought. In his decades conducting and teaching the polygraph in New York, London, Rome, Dubai, Keefe was a record breaker. His blood pressure was spiking. His breathing was slowing. His sweat gland activity was not what you’d expect of a bereaved fiance. Homicide generates stronger emotions than any other crime, and Gordon and Fleisher were expecting big reactions. But this was something else—these were the biggest reactions they’d ever seen.

Keefe’s nervous system was stirring up a perfect storm on the monitor. Whoever was watching behind the one-way observation glass was getting a show.

It was February 4, 1999, the fifteenth anniversary of Terri Brooks’s murder. Richard Walter had read the tea leaves at the murder scene and predicted that Brooks’s killer would be a man in his late thirties with an unkempt appearance who held a menial job and lived with his mother. Alfred Scott Keefe, pizza maker, age thirty-eight, lived with his mother.

In the hallway had gathered the combined powers of Bucks County law enforcement, waiting to pop the champagne on the biggest cold case in county history. The group included District Attorney Alan Rubenstein, a man with ambitions to be a judge, eager to crack what he called one of the “most brutal, heinous, and malicious homicides” he had ever encountered. There was Police Chief Arnold Conoline, the reformer hired to clean up a troubled department. One of his first moves had been to assign his detective sergeant, Wynne Cloud, to reopen the cold case. There was Cloud’s ambitious young patrolman, Nelson Whitney II, working his first murder case, who scored the coup of quietly convincing the pizza maker to voluntarily come in for questioning from his job at the pizza