fast.
“I just gave you the polygraph test, and you can tell them anything you want, but you and I both know you did it,” he said. He let that sink in a moment. “I just have one question. Did you kill her for drug money, or was it a lovers’ spat and she came at you with a knife and you defended yourself? The clock is running and you don’t have any more time.”
Keefe said, “Neither.”
Gordon’s eyes flared. “Listen, don’t insult my intelligence.”
“Neither.”
Gordon scowled. “OK, if you’re telling me it’s neither, I know you’re lying. Therefore I have to assume it’s the worst-case scenario: You killed her for the drug money. There’s no reason to talk to you anymore.”
Gordon propelled his bulk from the chair, stood up, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.
As Gordon emerged, the chief sent Whitney and his partner back in. The young cops were itching to close the case they had worked so hard on. Meanwhile, Gordon conferred with Fleisher. It was time, the two Vidocqeans agreed, to use the technique Fleisher called “The Everything Must Go Sale.” Getting a confession was the ultimate sales job, Fleisher said.
“You’re convincing a guy that it’s better to confess and go to jail for twenty years than to say nothing and walk free,” he said. “It’s the all-time sale. You’re convincing him he needs the very last widget the company has made, when in fact there are seven million more gathering dust on the shelves. Time is everything. You gotta act now; the clock is ticking.”
He and Gordon discussed possible approaches. “We have DNA evidence,” Fleisher suggested, “and if you don’t tell us what really happened by midnight, we’re going to have to go with it. We’re going to have to nail you.”
Gordon looked at his watch. They had less than a half hour to go. Whitney and his partner were still in the interrogation room with Keefe, getting nowhere. Gordon grabbed the biggest guy in uniform he could find, a sergeant, and pulled him aside. “I want you to go into the room and say, ‘Mr. Gordon came out, he says you did it, we don’t want to talk to you anymore,’ and walk out.” The sergeant went in, made his announcement, and came out.
Less than a minute later, patrolman Whitney came out of the interrogation room, grinning widely. He’d gotten the confession. “Keefe confessed. It was a lovers’ spat. He says he was trying to defend himself.” The suits and uniforms congratulated him as cheers filled the hallway.
Gordon quietly pulled the young officer aside. “I want you to go back in and take his cigarettes from him, turn your chair so you’re parallel at the table, right across from him, and tell him, ‘Bullshit. There’s no way a woman gets stabbed twenty times, suffocated, and beaten; it’s not gonna work as self-defense.’ ”
Whitney returned to the room and three or four minutes later emerged with a report. “As soon as I turned the chair and sat across from him, his head went down, his body gave in, and he admitted he killed her for money to buy drugs.”
Gordon nodded. “Good work. Now I want you to go back in and take a statement, name, birth, graduated, such and such—start from the beginning and then everything he did that night. I want it written down he’s confessing of his own free will, no threats or promises of anything. Ask him, why did he confess? In court it’ll be attacked—why would a person voluntarily give a confession against his own interests? So we need him to write down what his interests are—why did he confess?”
Whitney went back in. Minutes passed, the door stayed shut. The group in the hall fidgeted nervously.
Half an hour later he came out waving a handwritten confession and cheers went up in the hallway, louder now. The DA and deputy DA, the chief, Sergeant Cloud and his officers, and Gordon, Fleisher, and Gaughan were shaking hands, slapping backs, high fives all around. The Vidocq men felt excited to be part of the team. Rivalries and criticisms melted away instantly with success; they were all human, it was a natural part of the process. The VSMs said the cops had done a great job.
The charge would be first-degree murder, the DA said with an air of triumph. The deputy DA grinned as she studied the written confession.
“Didn’t these cops do a great job?” she said.
Later that morning, the DA held a press conference to announce an arrest in the county’s longest-running cold case. Surrounded by beaming cops, Rubenstein praised the police chief and his officers and their “dogged” and “high-tech” work. “These things don’t happen by accident,” he said. “It takes good police work. You can’t imagine the man- and woman-hours put into this.” Headlines in all the regional papers sung their praises. Betty Brooks said she was shocked but “relieved” and applauded the wonderful police work.
Nowhere was the Vidocq Society mentioned.
Sixteen months later, on June 5, 2000, Bucks County judge John J. Rufe sentenced Keefe to life in prison without parole for the murder of Terri Brooks. Keefe had pled guilty on the advice of his attorney, who said the evidence against him was so “overwhelming” the most they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty. Keefe refused to address Brooks’s parents directly, who said they were not surprised, and were satisfied with the outcome. In a related civil case, the Marriott Corporation, owners of Roy Rogers, paid Brooks’s sister, the administrator of her estate, $675,000 in a wrongful death settlement; $276,322 of the settlement went to the attorneys.
Nowhere were VSMs mentioned.
Fleisher admitted his disappointment in a
He praised the Falls Township Police Department, and especially Sergeant Cloud, now a Vidocq Society Member, for its “great work.” Yet, “It still hurts me that members who selflessly volunteer their time and expertise are not always publicly appreciated,” he wrote. “Whoever said, ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan,’ knew of what he was speaking.”
Fleisher said the case was a reminder to VSMs to “stop and remember what we are really about in the Vidocq Society and who is our ultimate client. The client was, is, and will always be the truth. And our client is an unforgiving one.”
He signed the column:
• CHAPTER 49 •
THE HAUNTING OF MARY
In the darkness before dawn in her Ohio home, Mary turned in the coils of a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was sweating. She got up and went into the kitchen, but the nightmare followed her. Even in waking hours now, she couldn’t escape it. She tried to calm herself, apply reason to the problem. She was in her fifties, a scientist, a Ph.D. chemist with a logical, orderly mind that had fueled an impressive executive career at one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies. “I was always good in the sciences,” she said. “You can trust science. It yields up its secrets, if one keeps looking. Science can play tricks, but it doesn’t lie.” But this problem didn’t respond to logic; it was at the farthest end of the spectrum from reason. She lived alone. It was terrifying. The horror had trailed her her whole life, but she’d managed to repress it. Now this demon of memory was demanding notice. The ghostly hollow eyes stared back, wherever she looked.
Before sunup, she picked up the phone and called her psychiatrist.
Early that morning of February 25, 2000, the psychiatrist called from his Cincinnati office to the Philadelphia Police Department and asked for homicide. He had a murder to report. Or rather, his patient, who had been
