Police also considered Brannon the main suspect. The most intense six-week murder investigation in county history had revealed that it was Brannon, estranged and banned from the house on Father’s Day, who had called 9 -1-1 for help on the morning of September 16, 1999. He told the dispatcher he’d found the bodies of his wife and older daughter and thought it was a murder-suicide, but then he saw that Cassidy was badly hurt, too.
He was cradling the four-year-old, dying from multiple stab wounds, in his arms.
“Sir. It’s gonna be OK, all right,” the dispatcher tried to calm him.
“It’s NOT gonna be OK,” he replied. “I’ve got two dead people here ’cause of me, all right. So just get somebody out here.” Three little words—the colloquial for “because of me”—had the whole county convinced Brannon was the killer, reporters wrote.
But as the crime lab did its work, all the physical evidence at the scene pointed to Larry Parks, a forty- seven-year-old landscaper who had recently dug the family’s pool. Parks’s DNA was found in a piece of skin under Sherry-Ann’s fingernail. Parks confessed that he was “mighty high” on cocaine and crystal meth that morning when, after a failed night of hunting hogs to sell for cash for more drugs, he knocked on Sherry-Ann’s door with the ruse that his truck had broken down, and forced his way in intending, he said, to rob her. When she fought back, he stabbed her ten or more times with a kitchen knife, went upstairs and stabbed Shelby to death in her bedroom, then dragged Cassidy downstairs and stabbed her in front of her dying mother.
Even though Parks pled guilty in exchange for three life terms—to avoid the death penalty—Bob Meyer said the case was destroying his family. He wanted Larry Parks dead. His wife had tried to enter the courtroom for Parks’s trial with a gun in her purse, an attempt at frontier justice all too common at POMC. His son-in-law, now exonerated, had plunged over the wooden railing to try to kill Parks. As deputies handcuffed him and took him away, his wife shouted toward the judge and Parks: “He killed our babies!”
Bob Meyer, boiling in anger and confusion and still suspecting his son-in-law, said he just wanted the truth: How and why could a human being do such things, and was it Parks, and why him, or his son-in-law? He asked for Walter to help. The Vidocq profiler studied the case file, and then flew to Tampa on Meyer’s request to sit in on Parks’s sixty-seven-minute confession to six attorneys and police officers. Afterward, Walter told Meyer that the killing, down to the last detail, was a perfect expression of Larry Parks’s history, personality, and character. Parks was “absolutely the killer and the only killer. He’s the purest, coldest power-assertive killer I’ve ever seen.”
The Meyers continued on their imperfect path of healing, but Walter remained concerned about Bob and Sherry. Passionate about music and baking, Sherry no longer found pleasure in her hobbies. She was dropping weight, growing sickly. Grief, Bob said, was literally killing her. Walter returned to Florida and walked in the door demanding one of Sherry’s “famous tangerine pies.” She said she didn’t feel like baking. “I want it now!” he insisted. She was out of tangerines, and the stores were closed. “Well, let’s go find some damn tangerines.” They drove country roads together until Walter spotted a tangerine tree behind a diner. The fruit was too high; laughing and scheming like schoolkids, they got a ladder. The pie was delicious. Late that night over Scotch, Bob confessed he was haunted by dreams of vengeance against Parks that sounded like something out of ancient Athens. “I’ll deny it if you tell anybody,” Meyer told the others, “but I want him blinded. I want Mr. Parks to live in prison not knowing what’s coming at him for the rest of his life.”
“As it happens, it’s not uncommon for one to have such feelings,” said Walter. “Indeed since the Greeks, it was deemed important to vent them in appropriate places—to the courts, to family, to friends, to one’s god—until we find our way again.” He left knowing there was still work to do.
Joy and Brian Kosisky also had a murder in the family that was ruining their lives. Joy’s brother had been murdered in Greenville, Pennsylvania. In gratitude for his work in helping them understand the case, the couple had sent him the crystal obelisk for Christmas. As Walter turned the glass in the sunlight, there appeared in the crystal the delicate lines of an angel, acid-etched into the interior of the glass.
“An acid angel,” he mused. “I quite like that.”
Now the acid angel, ensconced in a cloud of cigarette smoke, sat in his Chicago hotel room the day after his presentation with Bender. Before him sat a pair of Urbana, Illinois, police officers with their bulky cold-case file. The police from the southern Illinois city had presented one of the most notorious and puzzling cold murder cases in the state’s history to the Vidocq Society the previous spring, March 15, 2001. It was the 1988 murder of the wealthy, popular University of Illinois veterinary student Maria Caleel, a case that had earned Urbana police little but frustration and embarrassment for fourteen years.
After hearing Walter’s luncheon theory on the murder, police sent him the case file. They had driven the 140 miles from Champaign-Urbana to meet him while he was in Chicago and hear his thoughts.
“Gentlemen, now that I’ve read the file,” Walter said with a grim smile, “let me explain the case to you.”
The file for the fourteen-year investigation had grown to more than 1,600 pages. Police had accumulated forty suspects, but never made an arrest. “I’ve read the 1,600 pages on the computer, so I couldn’t make notations,” Walter said. “Nonetheless, I eliminated thirty-nine of the forty suspects. In the course of events, one is the killer, who has flown all these years just below the radar.”
“The killer was obviously someone Maria knew,” he continued. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning on March 6, 1988, Caleel was asleep in her garden apartment in Urbana when someone knocked on the door, or perhaps entered using a key. Her attacker struck in the dark, grabbing her from behind and plunging a six-inch knife upward and deep, precisely nicking her heart, and fled. As Caleel crawled to an apartment across the hall, dying from a single stab wound, a female student called police and asked her, “Who did this to you?”
“I can’t believe it,” Caleel replied. “I just can’t believe it.” Those were her dying words. She never identified her killer.
The murder of the attractive, bright, gifted twenty-one-year-old vet student made headlines across the country. Her friends said that Maria’s family dined with princes, yet they never knew she was wealthy. She had entered Brown University at sixteen, graduated with a biology degree, and was a straight-A student at the highly competitive Illinois vet school. Grounded in her love for animals, she rode her horse Tristan early on the day she died, and later that day tried to save the life of a prematurely born foal.
The police were “absolutely gobsmacked” by the murder, Walter said. It defied logic. There was no break-in, no robbery, no sexual assault. The popular young woman had no enemies who would want to kill her. The FBI was brought in to study the case, to no avail. Maria’s parents, the prominent Chicago physician Dr. Richard Caleel, and former model Annette, hired private eyes, and personally provided most of a $50,000 reward.
As the years passed with no arrests, the Caleels did everything in their power to keep the case and their daughter’s name alive. They donated a small fortune to create Maria Caleel funds and scholarships across the country—a Maria Caleel polo trophy at the Oak Brook Polo Club; Maria Caleel conferences on violence against women; a Maria Caleel University of Missouri journalism school award; Maria Caleel horse shows, equine research grants, a Maria Caleel prize for the best biology student at Brown. Finally, the Caleels asked their family-friend Lynn Abraham, the renowned Philadelphia district attorney and VSM, for advice. The DA recommended a Vidocq Society investigation.
Walter had sparred at times with Illinois investigators, using lines such as “I fully respect your constitutional right to be wrong, nonetheless . . .” But now his voice purred as he coolly described the killer as a young man in the vet school and friend of Caleel’s who bore a psychopathological anger toward her for her “relatively innocent college student flirtations.”
The signs of a murderer who killed neatly and efficiently “in a manner of disposing of trash” to correct a perceived wrong were evident at the scene. The killer’s precision with the knife was no accident given his anatomical skill with animals. With a misogynistic hatred, Walter said, “His thought process was thus: I didn’t realize she was a disgusting and despicable whore, but I’m responsible for her, and I’ll clean up the mess. So he killed her.” Walter raised an eyebrow. “With no one else among the forty suspects,” he explained, “can one draw a straight line connecting the crime and pre-crime and post-crime behavior? This guy is the lemons falling into place —the jackpot.”
At first skeptical, police grew enthusiastic and were finally stunned by the analysis emerging from billows of menthol smoke. They talked about zeroing in on the killer, now a prominent man with a wife and children, and unearthing his secret of fourteen years. It would not be easy, but the Vidocq Society would advise each step of the way.
“Are the police happy with our work? ” Fleisher asked later when Walter called to report in.
The thin man began to laugh. “Oh, yes. They’re as happy as a pervert with two dicks.”
