The Murder Room

parlor in Horsham, some twenty miles away. There was the deputy DA who had worked long hours on the case with Sergeant Cloud and Officer Whitney. VSM Ed Gaughan, the private eye and former Philadelphia homicide investigator, was on hand, eager to help crack the case he had brought to the Vidocq Society. The police had also invited VSMs Fleisher and Gordon with their polygraph equipment to assist in the interrogation if necessary. Though often challenged about its usefulness, the polygraph, in the hands of experienced examiners like Gordon and Fleisher, had been shown to be accurate in measuring truth versus deception better than 95 percent of the time. Few doubted its value as a tool to help pry loose a confession, or the fact that the Vidocq men were two of the most accomplished polygraph interrogators in the world. The men and women in the hallway behind the glass were confident he had done it, as confident as cops could be with DNA evidence in hand.

The DNA evidence was indeed damning. The trash that Whitney collected from Keefe’s curbside had yielded a treasure: the Newport Filter cigarette butt was Keefe’s brand. Testing of the dried saliva on the cigarette revealed male caucasian DNA—the same DNA found in the hair on Terri Brooks’s clothes, in the blood on the knife protruding from her throat, and in the bits of skin from under her fingernails that she had clawed off her attacker.

But was it the DNA of the other male caucasian living in the house, Keefe’s brother, Charles Keefe? Whitney tailed Charles Keefe to a restaurant, watched him smoke a cigarette, and retrieved the butt from the ashtray after Charles left the restaurant. Lab testing showed that Charles Keefe’s DNA did not match the DNA found on Terri Brooks.

It was technically possible that there was some other male caucasian DNA in the universe matching Alfred Keefe’s, and he was the wrong guy. But the odds were long—one in five quadrillion. If Keefe was going to find someone else to take the fall, a thousand new planets with five billion human beings on each would have to be discovered quickly.

Alfred Keefe was the killer.

All they needed now, after fifteen years, was a confession.

Whitney and another officer had started the interrogation shortly after 6 P.M., when Whitney brought Keefe in from the pizza parlor. As hours passed without a confession, Gordon and Fleisher had paced the hallway like caged beasts. Gordon lobbied the chief hard to let him and Fleisher go in with the polygraph. Keefe had had fifteen years to get his story together, and he had it down. He’d kept the interrogators at bay for hours with a cigarette and a sneer. Gordon and Fleisher believed the cops had not properly focused the interrogation, and squandered away the hours out of inexperience.

In Gordon’s view, the young officers had let Keefe get too comfortable by taking an extraordinarily detailed statement from him—where he was born, his mother’s name, and so forth. Keefe never felt pressured; interruptions didn’t help. A technician came in, swabbed Keefe’s cheek for additional DNA material, and left. Keefe was made to feel important, the center of attention, in control—not like the hunted man he was and needed to feel like to break.

Then the police began to run out of time. If the police didn’t bring Keefe before a magistrate on charges within six hours, they’d have to let him go. But letting Keefe go, now that they’d showed him their hand, was unthinkable. He’d have time to think up a better story, time to go twirl pizzas in Patagonia.

In the hallway, Gordon was about to explode. The police interrogators weren’t even detectives, Gordon thought. Patrolmen handed out traffic tickets, they didn’t bust down killers. What are you going to war with cavalry for when you got the fighter jets on the run-way itching to attack? he wondered. Finally the chief nodded to the Vidocq examiners to give it a try. Whitney left the interrogation room, and Gordon and Fleisher went in.

They’d been hammering away at Keefe now for more than an hour, watching the green digital sea whip into a frenzy, and Keefe was weakening. Fleisher looked over at Gordon and knew he was thinking the same thing: The guy’s bombing the test as bad as anyone, and his guard was down.

Fleisher stared hard at Keefe. It was time to go in for the kill.

“You blew it,” he said. “Your charts are some of the clearest ever. And they got the DNA. You’re doomed.”

Confronted by Fleisher with the overpowering evidence, Keefe seemed to lose the last of his composure. He was off balance, ready to drop. We could get a confession in two minutes, Fleisher thought.

Fleisher glanced at Gordon, who nodded his assent. Despite their drive to nail Keefe, their honor as VSMs was more important: Their role was to provide advice and counsel, “not steal anyone’s thunder.” Both men abruptly stood, told Keefe to stay seated, and left the room to find the cops.

Chief Conoline agreed his men would take it from there, finish what they started. He told Whitney and his partner to go back in. Fleisher asked what they thought of Keefe’s violent shaking when they watched through the observation window. The cops shrugged. They didn’t think anything. Nobody had been watching at the observation window.

Minutes later, the police adopted a new strategy. Whitney and his partner were joined by a uniformed officer said to know Keefe personally, and the three cops marched Keefe out of the small interrogation room and into a large, comfortable conference room and shut the door. Gordon and Fleisher exchanged puzzled looks. Twenty minutes later, with no confession emerging from the new room, Gordon couldn’t stand it any longer. He walked up to Chief Conoline and said, “I’m going in.” The chief nodded OK.

As Gordon opened the door, he saw the problem right away. Four faces around a long conference table turned to the huge bald man with the intense blue eyes. The room set-up is horrible, he thought.

Keefe was sitting nonchalantly at one end of the table, leaning close to the table. He was calmly smoking a cigarette, with an ashtray in front of him. He’s too comfortable, Gordon thought. He looks like he’s about to have dinner.

Keefe was using the expanse of table as a barrier to protect himself. “There can be no barriers between you and the suspect,” Gordon noted later. “You have to be in his face.”

Whitney was seated at Keefe’s left, going through a pile of photographs of Brooks’s corpse. One by one the officer showed Keefe the gruesome photographs of the bloodbath, as if their horror held great power. He told Keefe the police thought he was involved. Keefe was calmly shaking his head no. The uniformed cop who knew Keefe was on his right side, sitting up on the table nodding. “We think you were involved.”

The third cop sat opposite the suspect far across the long table, nodding his agreement, too.

Keefe drew on his cigarette, tipped it into the ashtray, and said coolly, “No, you got the wrong guy.” His eyes went from man to man.

Gordon knew that Keefe couldn’t be “induced by guilt and remorse into a confession.” Walter had advised the Vidocq agents and police not to even attempt it. With an anger-retaliatory or AR, “all attempts to create remorse will fail spectacularly, just empowering the suspect ARs who aren’t capable of guilt,” Walter said. “They’re not like you and me.”

Walter gave the example of a classic AR case he had worked of a lovers’-lane killer in upstate New York. The murderer viciously attacked a young couple, raped the woman while the boyfriend watched, then pumped twenty- five bullets into both of them. Arrested within an hour of the slaughter, the killer was sitting in the back of the police car en route to the police station, drenched in his victims’ blood, when he fell asleep. He was tired. “Anyone can understand it,” Walter said sarcastically. “He’d been very busy. It was a long day. Typical AR—absolutely no guilt.”

“You can’t show them photos of the killing and expect to weaken them into tender remorse,” Walter said. “These guys are euphoric half an hour to an hour after the killing! It’s a big relief, and that hardens into a certainty that ‘the bitch deserved it’! A guilt or shame-driven attack backfires. Lacking any such feeling he grows cooler and more powerful, more sure of his web of lies.”

Walter thought police were “always too hyped up about getting a confession. I’d rather establish fifteen different points of inconsistency in a perp’s story, fifteen lies, than one confession that can be overturned.” Yet with an AR killer, “the trick to a confession is to attack their weakness, get them off guard, then incite rage—reproduce the out-of-control anger that led them to commit murder in the first place.”

Gordon asked the cops to leave the room, then went to work. He walked swiftly to Keefe at the end of the table, grabbed a chair with one hand and plunked it down on the suspect’s right side, invading his space. Keefe turned to face Gordon. The large bald head leaned in, inches way. Gordon’s blue eyes looked fierce, and he talked