A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tuesday, July 31, 7:45 PM

Murphy stood outside the front door of the house on Freret Street using a flashlight to look for signs of forced entry, when he happened to glance down the driveway and see Kirsten pressed against the crime-scene tape, in the middle of a small scrum of reporters.

She was waving at him.

He ignored her.

She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled like a truck driver at a carload of naked cheerleaders.

Murphy stepped back inside the house. During the next hour, Kirsten called his cell phone six times.

At a quarter to nine, he stepped outside to get some fresh air. She was still there. A photographer stood next to her snapping pictures of Murphy.

Murphy walked down the driveway. He stood across the yellow tape from Kirsten. “You’re harder to get rid of than a dose of the clap,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You should know.”

“What do you want?”

As the other reporters pressed in, sensing a fight, Kirsten nodded toward the yard next door, signaling she wanted to get away from her colleagues. “I need to talk to you.”

Murphy shook his head.

She didn’t let his refusal stop her. “Is this case connected to the serial-killer investigation?”

“As far as I know there is no serial-killer investigation.”

“Is it true the victims are a mother and her two young children?”

A talking head from TV was yammering into his cell phone, careful not to mess up his perfectly coiffed hair. He stopped talking when Kirsten mentioned dead children. “I’ll call you back,” he said into his phone. He looked at Murphy. “Is that true, about the kids?”

Murphy stared at the TV pretty boy. “You’re going to have to talk to the department’s public-information officer. I can give you his contact information if you need it.”

The other reporters started firing questions at him.

Murphy walked away.

Later, when he peeked through a front window, Kirsten was gone.

A neighborhood canvass produced half a dozen suspect descriptions. After putting them together, Murphy had a good idea who he was looking for: a short, tall, fat, thin, white, black man in his early twenties to his late fifties, who had been driving a van, riding a bicycle, jogging, and walking a dog.

One neighbor saw the dog take a dump in the yard and suggested Murphy test the poop for DNA.

The coroner’s investigator gave the bodies a quick examination before bagging them.

Unofficially, he confirmed the boy had been raped. The little girl showed no signs of sexual assault.

The mother had been sodomized and raped with something large and sharp, in all likelihood the bloody butcher’s knife on the kitchen counter.

Lab results would take a few days, a forensic technician said, but he told Murphy not to count on fingerprints. There didn’t appear to be any on the boy’s neck or on the handle of the knife.

As the word had spread about the horrific triple murder, local reporters formed a phalanx at the end of the driveway. Then the networks showed up-CNN, NBC, Fox, CBS-as well as news stations from as far away as Mobile, two and a half hours east of New Orleans. The scent of serial murder was in the air.

Captain Donovan and Assistant Chief DeMarco showed up and stood in front of the TV cameras. They talked a lot but said little, though DeMarco was finally forced to admit that several recent homicides now looked like the work of a single killer.

“Is that the same thing as a serial killer?” one reporter quipped.

“Yes, a single killer,” DeMarco repeated, ignoring the distinction and the reporter’s mocking tone.

At midnight, the crime lab called Murphy’s cell phone. The preliminary examination of the package the newspaper had received was complete. There were no prints on the envelope or the letter. A fingerprint taken from the severed finger had come back to a young black woman with several arrests for prostitution. The Bureau of Identification was working on getting a picture from her rap sheet to compare it to photos taken of the dead woman found under the Jeff Davis overpass.

By 2:00 AM the rank and the reporters were gone.

Murphy and Gaudet spent the next several hours helping the crime-lab techs comb the house for evidence. They vacuumed the carpet for hair fibers, bagged the kids’ bedding and all the rugs in the house, and took a laptop computer. They also collected every scrap of paper they could find-mail, receipts, bills, notes and pictures from the refrigerator, an address book, even the little girl’s diary.

At 9:00 AM, after fifteen hours at the crime scene, Murphy drove his beat-up Toyota to the coroner’s temporary, post-Katrina office-a old funeral parlor in Central City.

The sign out front that identified the business as the Rivas and Colbert Funeral Home had been covered with a blue FEMA tarp. The only indication of what the building was currently being used for was a sheet of printer paper taped to the glass front door that said ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE.

Murphy pulled open the door and walked inside. The building smelled like mildew, rotting flesh, and formaldehyde.

To maintain the chain of custody for any evidence recovered from a homicide victim’s body-bullets, hair, fibers, skin-a detective had to be present for the autopsy. Like every police cadet, Murphy had been introduced to autopsies while he was in the academy, but since he first developed an interest in homicide investigation, he had become a student of the procedure.

He learned that the Egyptians had conducted detailed examinations of the dead. As had the Chinese. He read that a Roman physician had examined the body of Julius Caesar and found that only one of the dictator’s twenty-three stab wounds had been fatal. The doctors of antiquity were fascinated with death, Murphy discovered, and because of their fascination, the emerging science of medicine had learned much about what caused it.

Unfortunately, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages and much of that knowledge was lost. Over the intervening centuries, the subject of death became taboo.

The term autopsy came from the Greek word autopsia, meaning to see for oneself. In 1761, as Europe was emerging from its self-imposed darkness, Italian physician Giovanni Morgagni was the first to catalog autopsy procedures in his classic five-volume work, The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy. Murphy had read an English translation. In Morgagni’s day, autopsies were a blood-soaked, messy business. During the last two and a half centuries, they hadn’t changed much.

Still, Murphy was fascinated by them.

No matter how gruesome the autopsy, Murphy had always managed to keep the contents of his stomach down. His partner wasn’t so lucky.

While witnessing his first autopsy as a homicide detective, Gaudet had heaved up his breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage soaked in ketchup. Although blowing chow at a crime scene or an autopsy was usually enough to get a rookie homicide detective booted out of the unit, that didn’t happen in Gaudet’s case. For one, he was twice the size of most of the other detectives. For another, he was a very likeable guy: funny, tireless, gifted with great street sense, and absolutely fearless.

Murphy didn’t begrudge his partner his weak stomach. After years of working together, they had devised a division of labor that favored each other’s strengths. Murphy covered the autopsies while Gaudet finished at the crime scene or followed up on promising leads. This morning the crime-scene work was done, but Gaudet had still begged off on the autopsies. He claimed he had to go to court, so he went home for a shower and clean clothes.

Murphy hadn’t pressed Gaudet on his court appearance. Witnessing a child autopsy was tough for any detective, even Murphy. Sitting through a pair of them was going to be nearly unbearable.

When Murphy walked into the autopsy room, formerly the funeral parlor’s embalming studio, the dead woman, thirty-six-year-old Carol Sue Spencer, lay on her back on a stainless-steel examination table. The concave surface and rimmed edge of the table were designed to keep blood and other bodily fluids from spilling onto the floor. The table tilted slightly downward toward a drain at the foot. A hose with a spray nozzle was attached to the table and used to wash away the gore.

After each autopsy the medical examiner or an assistant hosed down the table and prepared it for a fresh body. In New Orleans, a city that year after year ranked as one of the deadliest in America, there was never a shortage of bodies.

As Murphy approached the table, he inhaled a putrid blend of blood, bile, and disinfectant. To Murphy, it was the smell of death.

Longtime Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Francis Maynard was handling the autopsy personally. Also in the room was one of his technicians, a thin black woman in green scrubs. Murphy guessed she was in her early twenties. As interesting as Murphy found the whole postmortem process, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to do this for a living, especially for a technician’s pay, which he guessed wasn’t much above minimum wage.

Dr. Maynard stood beside the table, near the center. He was in his midsixties, with gray hair and a jowly face that shook like Jell-O when he spoke. He wore a stained white lab coat and a pair of safety glasses to protect against blood splatter. Maynard had been instrumental in identifying hundreds of bodies after Hurricane Katrina.

Since the storm, the doctor looked worn out, Murphy thought.

Maynard started an audio recorder and adjusted the microphone that hung over the table. Then he began removing what little clothing Carol Sue Spencer had been wearing when her body was discovered. The doctor described each article as he removed it-one blue T-shirt with Nike logo, one black sports bra, one pair of blue and white New Balance running shoes, and one pair of white cotton socks. The technician stuffed the clothing into a paper bag and handed it to Murphy.

Maynard measured the body. Carol Sue Spencer had been five feet four inches tall. The examination table had a built-in scale that showed a weight of 132 pounds. The doctor cut the cable tie from around her neck and passed it to Murphy. Beneath the tie, the skin was deep purple. Spencer’s eyes were open and filled with blood. Her tongue was dark and swollen.

Dr. Maynard examined and probed for half an hour.

The rectal wounds were horrific.

“It’s my understanding that you recovered a knife from the scene,” Maynard said.

Murphy nodded. “A butcher’s knife.”

The doctor nodded as he lifted Spencer’s left leg with one hand and used a thin stainless steel rod to probe her shredded rectum. The rod was marked like a ruler.

Murphy looked at his shoes.

“I would say he penetrated the anus at least a dozen times,” Maynard said. “The deepest puncture reaches a good ten inches into the sigmoid colon.”

“Was she alive?”

The doctor nodded. His face was sweating and his safety glasses had slid midway down his nose. “I’d have to say yes. She may not have been conscious when these wounds were inflicted, but she was alive.”

Maynard picked up a scalpel from a side table and prepared to gut Carol Sue Spencer. His first incision ran from shoulder to shoulder across her sternum. Then he sliced down the midline of her torso to the pubic bone. He peeled Spencer’s flesh back from her chest and abdomen and exposed her rib cage.

He laid the bloody scalpel down and picked up a pair of rib cutters. The cutters reminded Murphy of pruning shears. After snapping through each rib, Maynard lifted out the front of Spencer’s rib cage as a single piece, like pulling out the grill on a car.

Maynard and his technician cut out Spencer’s organs, weighed them, then placed them in a pair of organ buckets that stood at the head of the examination table. Each bucket was lined with a red plastic biohazard bag.

The smell was nauseating.

“She was a smoker,” Maynard said. He held up one of Spencer’s lungs for Murphy to see. A light dusting of tiny black pellets covered the tissue. “That’s tar from cigarettes.”

Murphy had seen it before. Maynard was a reformed smoker and he liked to show everyone what smoking did to the lungs. But Spencer’s lung tissue, aside from the scattering of tar, was still a healthy pink. In older, lifelong smokers whom Murphy had seen cut open, the tissue was gray and crusted over with gobs of sticky black tar.

Maynard spent a long time examining Spencer’s colon from the inside of her abdomen. “I don’t think she bled to death,” he finally said. “There is no major arterial damage.”

“So it was strangulation?”

Maynard, whose head was jammed halfway into Spencer’s open torso, nodded. “Preliminary findings only, but I think so.”

Then it was the children’s turn on the table, the little girl first. Maynard took about forty-five minutes with each one. The kids were beyond caring what happened to them, but for Murphy the child autopsies were torture. He stepped back and leaned against the wall, as far from the examination table as he could get.

While Maynard poked, prodded, cut, and peeled, he kept up a running commentary. Everything he saw, the doctor said, was consistent with what the detectives concluded at the crime scene. The little girl had died from suffocation, most likely with her own pillow. The boy died from manual strangulation.

“Due to a lack of blood present in the area of the torn rectal tissue, coupled with the lack of swelling,” Maynard said into the microphone, “I’d say the sexual assault occurred postmortem. The rape kit will confirm, but I did not detect the presence of semen. The faint trace of a latex smell leads me to suspect the perpetrator used a condom.”

Maynard’s mention of a condom reminded Murphy of something. They had found no used condoms or open packages at the crime scene, but there had been condoms in the house. In the master bedroom, downstairs, a two-drawer nightstand had been emptied, the contents dumped on the floor.

Other than the bodies, the nightstand was the only thing that had been disturbed inside the house. Several unopened condoms were lying on the floor next to a small overturned wicker basket.

To Murphy, only one explanation fit the facts. The killer got a hard-on while he strangled the little boy. He ran downstairs into the mother’s bedroom, found a basket of condoms, then rushed back upstairs and raped the boy’s dead body.

The killer was branching out, expanding his victim profile. Beefing up patrols where street-walking prostitutes tended to gather wasn’t going to do any good. The murder of Carol Sue Spencer and her two children had been as much of a message as the killer’s letter to the Times-Picayune. He was boasting that he could strike anywhere he wanted, and the police were powerless to stop him. No one was safe. Not even children.

To catch him, Murphy realized, he had to get inside the killer’s head. He had to figure out how the killer operated and how he selected his victims. He had to think like the killer.