The unmarked police sedan came out of Manlius, New York, south on I-81, and down into the Appalachian ridge-and-valley country of Pennsylvania. It was a melancholy tumble of twisted forested roads and steep bluestone hills shadowing rocky streams. A hundred miles south, they reached the Biddle House at noon. Richard Walter answered the door himself.
He ushered them into the parlor, seated them in the nineteenth-century chairs. As they laid the case file on the antique cherry table, he offered them a spot of coffee or tea. “Would anyone like cookies? I bake them myself, chocolate chip and gingersnaps, with real butter in the old-fashioned way, and I don’t fool around with the chemistry. They’re quite wonderful recipes.” Lieutenant Kevin Barry and his two officers said they’d love some cookies.
Over steaming coffee, Walter lit a Kool and said, “As a point of fact, there are only about five of us profilers in the world who know what we’re doing. The rest who claim to be profilers are fucking charlatans and frauds.”
The cops grinned. It was true that profilers were getting a bad name in some quarters.
“In truth, I prefer the term ‘crime assessment’ to ‘profiling,’ ” Walter continued. “Now because of all the TV forensic dramas and the amateur hour on the nightly news the public thinks profilers are wizards who come out of caves with their fantastic visions or some Borborygmic grumblings, but you can’t get there from here. The frauds read our stuff and give flip out-of-context assessments like, ‘He’s driving a blue car and hates women.’ It doesn’t work that way. Like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work. We’re talking probabilities and years of experience with similar cases, and analyzing them through the psychological continuum as well as the crime scene continuum.”
Walter tipped his chin and blew cigarette smoke to the ceiling. “Gentlemen, let me explain the case to you in terms of a crime assessment.”
Many factors, he said, including the remote burial of the young woman’s corpse, suggested the victim was a prostitute. Power-driven killers “love to kill prostitutes,” and when they do they dump the body as if disposing of trash. This type of killer typically makes a bold assault to the head, a straight-on attack, and here “we find that the victim’s skull has been smashed, the apparent cause of death.”
The half of a zipper police found near the surface of the grave was a valuable clue. “With this type of killer,” Walter said, “we often find that the clothing of the victim had been forcibly torn off.” According to a police report, four teeth of the zipper were damaged. Detective Keith Hall led the painstaking effort to find and interview the zipper manufacturer and learned that “the damage appears to have been caused by the slider pulling out over the teeth when the zipper was forcibly pulled apart.”
“Given these and other factors and probabilities, it’s highly likely that the killer is in his early to midtwenties, an ex-con, very muscular, lifts weights, macho, emotionally primitive, arrogant, drives a pickup truck, has girlie magazines lying around.”
“As it happens,” he went on, “Updegrove fits the profile. That’s not to say he did it. But it was a guy like him, happy brandishing guns or other weapons—a guy with a criminal record.”
They left with pages of notes, and cookies in freezer bags.
• CHAPTER 51 •
THE KILLER ANGELS
Women around the wealthy, seventy-one-year-old Alabama businessman had a nasty habit of disappearing. So when he called the police to report his second wife missing, he was a suspect. Thirty years earlier, he had murdered his former mother-in-law—strangled and then stabbed the dead woman thirty-seven times with an ice pick—then returned home and told his first wife, “Our life is going to change. I killed your mother.” He had done only thirteen months in a reformatory, then received a partial pardon from Kentucky’s governor.
“That’s one for
That summer Bender felt as if the other dimension was shadowing his daily life. He and Walter flew to Chicago to make a joint presentation, “Criminal Case Studies,” to the Federal Bureau of Prisons national training program. After the lecture at the Chicago Hilton, two nuns who worked in prisons approached the artist and profiler with rosy praise, broad smiles on their faces.
“You two do the work of angels,” one said.
“Killer angels, perhaps,” Bender said.
Walter was taken aback. He was quite sure that if a God had made the world He would not have created Theodore Bundy, but he held his tongue and mumbled a polite thank-you. Though it made him profoundly uneasy, he had to admit the seraphs of God seemed to be following him.
At Christmas, he had received an unusual gift—a crystal obelisk depicting an angel—from a young Pennsylvania couple who had long suffered the agonies of grief, fury, and uncertainty over the unsolved murder of the wife’s brother. He had met them at a convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, and his heart went out to them, as it did all the woebegone men and women at POMC who called him, there was no getting around it, “the avenging angel.”
Yet it was not merely vengeance the profiler peddled to the stricken; it was wholeness and health. He had volunteered his services in the name of the Vidocq Society to speak to parents about the unspeakable, to wield sword or soft words, whatever tool necessary to vanquish their demons. “Their tormentors are all in the mind,” he said. “Either their own or the mind of their child’s killer. It’s a matter of bringing the darkness to light.” Just he, it seemed, could explain it all.
Only at POMC conventions could one find a hotel conference room filled with fifty mothers whose children had been murdered. At the Cincinnati Westin they gathered to hear a talk on murderer subtypes, earnest faces turning to the tall, balding, bespectacled, thin man they had seen rushing through the hallways in his dark suit like a blade.
He began his lecture by asking jauntily, “How many of you folks have not heard my little talk before?” Hands went up. “Liars!” he bellowed, and they roared with laughter. He approached a woman in the front row with a small trash can. “Madam,” he said, “if you are about to eat that butterscotch candy, please unwrap it and put it in your mouth now. I will not have plastic crinkling whilst I attempt to speak.” They gasped and laughed again. They loved him. Blasphemous, courtly, reeking of smoke and profanity, they loved him. After the speech, one by one, the mothers filed into a small smoking room of the hotel for private meetings with Walter in his cloud of Kools. In gentle, ten-minute confessionals, each gave a capsule description of their child’s murder, answering the detective’s questions—was the body face up or down? Was the knife at the scene?—and one by one they left with palpable serenity, careworn faces smoothed in some sense of peace. “He told me why Brian died,” an Asian woman said, leaving the confessional in Cincinnati. “For the first time I know. Now I can really grieve and heal.”
Walter had the mind to discern and the heart to explain within the limits of human understanding why and how a heart of darkness took their child. He gave evil its place, however difficult, in the human family; saw shapes and forces at work that others did not. He was, one journalist said, the Stephen Hawking of the universe of the damned.
Bob Meyer, a retired Tampa doctor, and his wife, Sherry, told Walter they were devastated to the point of emotional breakdown by the senseless, vile murders of their daughter Sherry-Ann Brannon, a lovely thirty-five- year-old blonde, and grandchildren: Shelby, seven, and Cassidy, four. The murders had occurred in Sherry-Ann’s large, new dream house with pool in Manatee County, Florida. There was no sign of forced entry. Meyer was convinced his son-in-law, Dewey Brannon, who had recently left the dream house and Sherry-Ann for another woman in the midst of a contentious divorce, was the killer.
