Commissioner Fleisher prepared for the event as if for a State of the Union address. After the prime rib and salmon, the cake and the coffee, and as the wine and whiskey made extra rounds, Fleisher would emcee the awards ceremony for the coveted Vidocq Society Medal of Honor. The ball was the moment to take stock; a chance to look back and ahead. For nearly twenty years now Fleisher had done so with pride, excitement, and keen anticipation of what was to come. He had watched the society grow from a social luncheon club for detectives to a crime-fighting organization with a global reach.
The Vidocq Society family had grown from three men at lunch to 82 full members, one for each year of E. F. Vidocq’s life, to more than 150 total members, including associates. They had investigated more than 300 unsolved murders, solving 90 percent, offering advice and counsel and the name of the killer. There were more tangible results: arrests, convictions, and depression, and perhaps suicide prevented among families haunted by murder. Truth was their client. It was Aeschylus who said the words of truth are simple, and so it was with the Vidocq Society’s achievements: the lost found, the nameless named, the guilty punished, the innocent set free. VSMs were helpmates to the living, heroes to the dead.
Fleisher, Bender, and Walter sat separately at the round tables, honoring the democratic fellowship. But even the casual views of them standing together in the great hall, draped in the bronze relief medals of E. F. Vidocq cast by Bender, their own Medals of Honor for meritorious service, were powerful affirmations of their unique partnership, the heart of the Vidocq family.
It was a family that kept growing. Jim Dunn, now a tricolor-pinned VSM, shared news that he said was “music to my ears”—his son’s killer was denied parole until 2013. Walter said in a letter to the Texas Parole Board that by refusing to reveal what happened to Scott’s body, Leisha Hamilton showed that “for her . . . the murder is not over!” She was an unrepentant psychopath with an “insatiable desire for stimulation and conquest” who would seek new victims: “If and when [Hamilton] is reviewed again for release, it is suggested that you re-read this letter.”
Dunn and Walter would continue to battle to keep her in prison the full twenty years, until 2017. But time and Dunn’s wife were steering him toward Walter’s wisdom that a man lets the fires of fury and righteousness burn down.
Walter’s wisdom was for others. He burned with the desire to put away a third killer of Scott Dunn who had “flown beneath the radar all these years.”
“I reminded Jim I’m a graduate of the Evelyn Woods School of Revenge. I’m in this for the long haul.”
It was a night for stories, family stories. Walter was full of them. He had received a strange package from a man in New Jersey some years ago, Mike Rodelli, who claimed to have solved the most famous unsolved serial killer case in modern American history. He’d learned the name of the Zodiac Killer, the unknown assailant who had killed five Californians in 1968 and 1969, taunting the police with letters and cryptograms. Walter had been skeptical, but he’d worked with the amateur sleuth for years, coaching him, and now he was convinced the man was right—the Zodiac Killer was still alive, an elderly and quite wealthy man in California, still living off the pleasure of his iconic murders. Few doubted Walter. He’d also worked for years with another amateur investigator, Ohio trucker Robert Mancini, whom Walter believed had finally cracked the case that Eliot Ness couldn’t. Years after the Vidocq Society studied the case, Mancini had identified the Butcher of Cleveland. The killer was a long-dead sexual sadist who’d worked for the railroads. Justice was a different matter in both cases; justice always was.
“Did I tell you about the time I killed a prosecutor?” Walter asked. He had gone to Oklahoma on a Vidocq Society case to confront the state attorney on a double murder the prosecutor refused to investigate for political reasons, and demanded he file murder charges. The prosecutor told him, “Screw yourself and leave the state.” Walter replied, “I could go through you as easily as around you, but I’d prefer to give you a chance to grow wiser. I will call you three days after Thanksgiving, and if you have not changed your mind, you and I will have a man-to-boy chat.” The prosecutor died of a heart attack before Thanksgiving. “Good!” Walter told the prosecutor’s office. “Whom do I have to deal with next?” Fleisher called the governor of Oklahoma, a friend of his, and the result was “an extremely cooperative new prosecutor,” Walter said. “We solved the case.”
Walter was nearly seventy years old and suffered winter ailments now of greater duration. But he hadn’t slowed down.
“Did I tell you about the time I killed a priest?” Walter asked.
The solving of the double murder in Hudson, Wisconsin, had become one of his favorite stories. After the suicide of Catholic priest Ryan Erickson, whom Walter had named as the prime suspect, the police had taken the profiler’s unusual advice to try to establish the dead cleric’s guilt in court. In a remarkable October 2005 “John Doe” hearing, St. Croix County circuit judge Eric Lundell determined the priest had committed the double murder to avoid exposure as a pedophile. The priest’s lawyer refused to attend, maintaining his deceased client’s innocence. There was no jury.
The prosecution presented fifteen witnesses
Judge Lundell wrote, “I conclude that Ryan Erickson probably committed the crimes in question. On a scale of one to ten, I would consider it a ten.” The Vidocq Society awarded the Medal of Honor to several members of the Hudson Police Department for solving the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home.
Fleisher was especially proud of their work on the tragic case of Marie Noe, convicted of killing eight of her babies. Three months after her arrest, Marie Noe, then seventy years old and walking into the courtroom with a cane, pleaded guilty in June 1999 to smothering eight of her ten children beginning in 1949. The case drew national attention, forcing police and medical professionals to rethink many cases long believed to be sudden infant death syndrome or “crib death” as possible murders.
Marie’s husband, Arthur, sat shaking his head as the names of the eight children were read aloud, and the prosecutor described his wife as “as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy.”
Noe’s lawyer, David Rudenstein, said Marie did not have “the heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that make us human. Some things happen in life that we cannot understand.”
The court treated Marie more like a sad old mother than a psychopathic killer. She would serve no jail time for mass murder. By the conditions of her plea bargain, which took into account Arthur’s frail health, she was given twenty years of probation, the first five under home confinement, with at least a year with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. She was also ordered to undergo treatment sessions with a psychiatrist; her brain was said to be important to study for clues to the root causes of infanticide. Marie told detectives, “All I can figure is that I’m ungodly sick.”
The Vidocq Society had awarded Medals of Honor to
Even amid celebration, Fleisher had regrets. “I’m Jewish,” he said. “I always have regrets.”
Near the top of the list was Carol Ann Dougherty, the nine-year-old raped and murdered in a church in 1962. The Bristol police investigation had gone nowhere. DNA testing advised by the Vidocq Society was “inconclusive.” In 1997, Chief Frank Peranteau told the Vidocq Society that “he considers the matter over as the Grand Jury had identified a possible suspect who has been convicted of another murder in another state,” O’Kane wrote in the Vidocq case log. “The investigation appeared to clear the suspect priest, but he could not explain the ligature,” the strangulation marks that matched a priest’s cincture. No arrests were made.
But thirteen years after the Vidocq Society called the priest the prime suspect, a Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 named Father Sabadish one of sixty-three pedophile priests that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had allowed to prey on their flocks in the past fifty years. The archdiocese was accused of routinely transferring molesters to keep hundreds of abuse allegations from surfacing.
Joan McCrane testified to the grand jury that Sabadish molested her when she was seven years old in 1960, two years before Carol was murdered, at St. Michael the Archangel in Levittown. It started with “tickling,” she said. “He’d put his hands on my shoulders. Then, on my chest. Then, down my pants. . . . He told me that it was our secret and that I was never to tell anyone or we’d both go to hell. I never said anything because I was a little girl and I was scared to death.”
