Angel of Death

FIFTEEN

Donna Leland stood in front of her medicine cabinet mirror and looked at her sallow skin and the rings under her eyes and thought, It’s a strange thing, getting ready for court.

As a cop, she’d gotten ready for court plenty of times, usually when somebody said the radar gun lied. Then it had been easy: cop blues, a braided ponytail, a dusting of blush, and she looked authoritative but human. She’d never lost in court before.

But how do I get ready today? How do I want to look? Authoritative and human?

Donna began with foundation, hiding freckles and blemishes and filling in some of the worry lines. Then she added blush to her cheeks. It was a sign of health. The women in Auschwitz used to prick their fingertips and smear the blood on their cheeks to look healthy and happy so the Nazis wouldn’t choose them for the ovens.

Is that what I want to do? Look healthy and happy?

Azra had killed again. He’d killed his bunkmate, his only friend. He’d killed to impress God, who apparently was a tougher audience than Jodi Foster. And what if God still wasn’t impressed? The next step up from killing a bunkmate was killing a bedmate. Eye liner. That’s what I need. It’s the right look – something to let the judge know how sad and tired and scared I am.

“All rise. Circuit Court Branch One of the County of Racine in the State of Wisconsin is now in session, the honorable Judge Sandra Devlin presiding.” The bailiff glanced around the crowded courtroom as though expecting opposition and then flicked his eyes toward a paneled doorway that slid open.

Through it stepped Judge Sandra Devlin. She was a small woman, further dwarfed by the walnut-paneled bench and the standing-room-only crowd. She seemed a caricature of a witch. Her skin was rubbery – brow, nose, and chin forming an ill-fitting mask – and her bright eyes glowed with caprice above her black robes. Judge Devlin slid the door closed behind her. She smiled pleasantly to no one, scuttled up the stairs behind the bench, and wriggled into her seat. Already distracted by paperwork, she waved the crowd to sit. They did.

Judge Devlin rapped the gavel and said, “The court will come to order. Today begins the trial of case number 96CF00132, the State of Wisconsin versus John Doe.”

She nodded toward a pair of policemen, who had just resumed their seats by the prisoner’s door. They rose slowly, opened the door, and ambled through it into a dimly lit hall of cinder block.

The previous hush deepened to silence. A few shutters snicked quietly, photographers checking for focus. No one wanted to miss the shot of the Son of Samael appearing at that door.

As in a Dickensian stage play, there came a formless shadow on the already dark wall. The accused loped outward. Wing tips clopped like devil hooves on the floor. A gaunt figure in a wool jacket shambled into view.

“My God,” muttered a man.

The utterance brought them all up in their seats. It created a high-pitched whine like the sound just before a cable snaps. The chatter of cameras became a cicada song. An overly tall, overly thin man emerged.

“Bundy,” said the same man.

The resemblance was undeniable. Dark hair. Handsome features. Eyes steely and calm. Smile almost apologetic, as if he was sorry the crowd had to put up with all the lies spoken about him.

Still, the bandage on his right hand told that one of the spectacular stories was true.

The accused moved toward the defense table, where Counselor Barnett and Detective Donna Leland pulled out a chair for him.

“Thank you, Donna,” said the man.

“You’re welcome, William.”

He sat with a lean, contrite motion: his hands swung down into his lap, and his close-cropped head bowed in a combination of respect and guilt. The camera lenses still scissored open and shut behind him. The air fairly hummed. Eyes were wide and unblinking. Tongues shied back from teeth. The room was filled with a communal and galvanic dread, the sort reserved for celebrities, messiahs, and demons. He was all of them. No longer would the name John Doe mean anonymity. Now it would mean depravity. The insistent clamor of gavel raps cut through the buzz of glaring eyes and grinding teeth.

“Enough,” the judge said quietly. “If every movement of the accused is going to make a sensation, I’ll clear the court.” She peered around the room, eyes focusing just above the half-glasses she wore for reading. She had the stern air of a schoolmarm. “Better.”

Without abandoning the papers beneath her fingers, she said, “John Doe, you are charged with four murders in the county of Racine, a fifth in Walworth County, and a sixth in Kenosha County. Once this trial is concluded, you will be extradited for trial in the state of Illinois, and after that, the state of Indiana. Is this understood?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” he replied. Though quiet, his voice carried through the room.

“All right, then,” Judge Devlin said, “let’s get to it. Opening arguments. Counselor Franklin, are you prepared?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” he said, standing. Jim Franklin was tall, strong, and handsome. His gray-blue suit made him seem a man of stainless steel. The gray-blue shadow of a latent beard extended the sheen of the suit up across his Adam’s apple and to his cheekbones. With a theatrical flair, he gazed down at the tabletop, where his hands patiently sifted through the folios spilled from his attache.

Counselor Barnett watched her colleague, her adversary. The look of attention on her face deepened to annoyance.

Franklin glanced at her, then up at the bench, and last at the jury. “Your Honor, people of Wisconsin, what we begin today is a most difficult trial.

“That man there, known in the records as John Doe, stands accused in this state of six brutal murders. These were monstrous crimes, involving amputations and gallons of blood. He has supplied various confessions of his guilt, saying he killed his cell mate Derek Billings by strangling the man with a penny and his own thumb; saying he orchestrated the five other murders – what we call ‘murder by proxy.’ Still, he pleads not guilty. He has passed a competency hearing and remains in command of his own defense – but still he plans to tell you he is insane. He wants it both ways. He is sane and guilty when it benefits him, and insane and not guilty when that works better.

“Insane? Not guilty? I don’t think so. I don’t think even this man thinks so. Just two weeks ago, the defense got nervous and began pushing for a plea-bargain verdict of guilty in exchange for a declaration of insanity, letting John Doe live out his days in a comfortable mental institution rather than a maximum security penitentiary. I would not allow that. This man is not insane. Murderous, yes. Cunning, ruthless, manipulative, charismatic, yes. But insane? No.

“You wonder: How can a man who enjoyed decapitating perfect strangers not be insane? Well, first you must understand what is meant by insanity. It is a legal term, not a psychiatric one. By law, a person is insane if he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.

“An insane person, thus, does nothing to hide his crimes: he does not perceive of them as criminal. This man hid his crimes. He found a violent paranoid schizophrenic in a poorly run group home and used him to fulfill his murderous fantasies. John Doe is not insane. If he were, why would he choose a patsy to commit his crimes? Why would he carefully avoid leaving his own fingerprints anywhere? Because he knew what he was doing was wrong.

“John Doe is not psychotic – unable to understand and cope with the world in which he lives. He is sociopathic. He knows exactly what he is doing in this world. He understands right and wrong but chooses wrong. He pretends to be mentally ill so that he can kill with impunity. Here is a man who admits to two gruesome murders and is suspected of many more, in three separate states!

“Through expert testimony from psychiatrists, police officers, medical examiners, and FBI profilers, the prosecution will show you the man behind this smug mask. You will see that John Doe is more cunning than Ted Bundy, who some say slew more than fifty women from coast to coast before he was stopped. You will see that John Doe is more duplicitous than John Wayne Gacy, the upstanding building contractor and birthday party clown who buried more than thirty young men and boys in his own home. You will see that John Doe is more sexually sadistic than Jeffrey Dahmer, who drugged and raped his victims, killed them, had sex with their dead bodies, dissected them, and ate the pieces.

“These four killers are the same – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – people who, on the surface, seem incapable of the atrocities they easily, constantly, and secretly committed. All four – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – invented elaborate lies to cover their actions. Doe’s lies sound like those of David Berkowitz – the Son of Sam, who said his dog was an ancient Babylonian devil, telling him to kill.

“I need not refer to the tabloids. Doe, in his own confessions, provides the best and most damning copy. He has an elaborate cover story. He says he killed all these people – and many more – because he is a fallen angel.

“Don’t laugh. That is the man’s defense. He wants you to think he is not just crazy, but legally insane. His lawyer has an even more unbelievable lie, that he is a shell-shocked Gulf War hero. He is no hero, folks. He is no angel, but a cold-blooded killer.

“If Wisconsin had a death penalty, I would plead for it in this case. Because we do not, I hope for back-to-back life sentences for every victim to be served and without the possibility of parole. He’s fooled too many people for too long. Don’t become the next victims of this charismatic sociopath. Thank you.”

District Attorney Franklin gazed one last level time at the jury and then again at the judge, his eyes keen and honest. He sat, his stainless steel suit silently reshaping around him.

“A statement from the defense?” prompted Judge Devlin.

Lynda Barnett rose. After the slick coldness of Franklin’s delivery, the woman in the bright skirt-suit seemed a tribal wise woman, a storyteller. Her flesh was the color of good, rich earth. Honest. Direct. There was no shuffling of papers on the table, no leaning intensity. There was only the calm, quiet sound of soft-soled shoes on the cold marble floor.

She turned toward the jury. “It would be so easy if what Mr Franklin said were true. But truth isn’t a melodrama. We do not live our lives among heroes and monsters. We live among people. That’s what we are, people.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet a very troubled person, Mr William B. Dance,” she gestured to the prisoner. “Mr Franklin would not call him a person. Not even a mentally ill person. He calls him a monster – a hobgoblin, a bogeyman, the creature in the closet.

“It’s not that Mr Franklin really believes in such things, but he thinks the rest of us do, or at least he thinks he can scare us into believing in them. He offers folk tales. I offer facts. I want a fair trial; he wants a lynch mob.

“What facts does he ignore? How about Mr Dance’s wallet, with his driver’s license and Social Security card? How about the records of the American Veterans Administration and the Veterans of Foreign Wars POW MIA lists? How about the grade school principal from Waukesha who will tell us what he remembers of a shy orphan named Billy Dance? How about the enlistment records of the Marines?

“The fact is that this man was a ward of the State of Wisconsin in the seventies, that this homeless boy was remanded to juvenile detention centers instead of foster care, that at seventeen he fled the Racine Institute of Corrections, that he walked and hitchhiked from Wisconsin to Washington, DC, thinking he needed to go to the capital to join up for the Gulf War. He was so eager to make something of himself and defend his country that he volunteered for the Marines, that he landed in battle the very next year and was lost during the push to Baghdad.

“Lost to us, yes, but not to Saddam Hussein. It was 1991, and the nineteen-year-old Dance was interrogated day and night. He was beaten savagely when he gave no information, not even name, rank, and serial number. He so wanted to be true to his country that he purged his mind of everything. He became a shock-induced amnesiac. I, too, have expert witnesses to establish the reality of such conditions. He was beaten near to death many times, and each torment was like the first, because he blocked out the wounds as they happened. Still, the bullet wounds and torture scars on his body remember those days that he cannot.

“We left Iraq. William stayed. We gave up seeking him. He – though he had wiped his mind clean of all the particulars of his previous life, such as it was – kept alive in his heart some homing reflex. He, who had never had a true home, still yearned to return to his country.

“Then, twelve years later, we came back to Baghdad and found William Dance, the ‘crazy American pincushion,’ as his captors liked to call him, in one of the rape rooms of Abu Ghraib prison. The American soldiers who rescued him seemed like angels carrying him out of the hands of devils, and Dance was soon slated to appear with President Bush in the Rose Garden.

“He never did. While in the charge of his rescuers, William witnessed an American atrocity. Before his very eyes, his rescuing angels turned to tormenting devils.

“Dance could take no more. He spoke out against what we were doing in Baghdad, spoke out against the president whose reign of war was as brutal as Saddam’s reign of terror, spoke out to the first reporter he could find, a man who happened to work for Al Jazeera…”

As a low groan came from the crowd, Counselor Barnett paced slowly, nodded at the floor. When the courtroom had settled to silence again, she held her hand out toward her client.

“This prisoner of war – missing in action for twelve years – was no longer invited to the Rose Garden. No, sir. William B Dance, POW MIA, was remanded to Guantanamo.”

This time, the crowd gasped. Counselor Barnett lifted her eyes, and they sparked with fire.

“You bet. Gitmo. Waterboarding’s just the beginning at Gitmo. When you’re at Gitmo, the interview’s not over till there’s blood. When you’re at Gitmo, the interview is never over. So, the guy was saved from beatings by the Butcher of Baghdad only to get beat by Uncle Sam himself!”

The hubbub of the crowd caused Judge Devlin to rap her gavel. “Quiet down, all of you. This isn’t story time. This is a trial!”

Counselor Barnett nodded her thanks to the judge.

“Well, William escaped Guantanamo the only way you can: by playing dead. Yes, he got out in a body bag and went to an American base in Mexico and then waded the Rio Grande to reach America.

“Remember, we are talking about a Marine, trained until his survival skills were instinctive. We’re talking about a man who lived through thirteen years of torture. When he returned home to Milwaukee, who was there to deprogram him? Who was there to tell him the war was over, that he wasn’t surrounded by enemies?

No one. He fought onward, slaying anyone who endangered his mission.

“What mission, you ask? The same mission of every Marine, to follow orders, to take and hold enemy soil, and to slay any who seek to harm his country. These are powerful directives, especially when indoctrinated into the mind of a twenty year-old, especially when they are deepened and transformed by thirteen years of agony.

“What happens to good soldiers when their minds are impregnated so young and then abandoned, so that doctrines grow and grow? William Dance came to believe he was the Angel of Death for Milwaukee and Chicago, making certain anyone who died in this area died well.

“Into this terrifying delusion came a single ray of humanity: Detective Donna Leland of the Burlington Police Department. William fell in love with her. Nearly twenty years of insanity slowly dissolved away. At last, he began to regain his humanity.

“In the end, Your Honor, people of Wisconsin, what we have here is no demon-possessed man living among the graves. What we have is the lost lamb who, after all the torments he has endured, has gone crazy. Perhaps the prosecution is correct that William knows right from wrong, but William learned right and wrong in Marine boot camp and the sun-baked sands of the Middle East.

“How could we, who abandoned him, possibly condemn him to a lifetime of punishment for it? Isn’t it time we deprogrammed the creature we programmed in the first place? To paraphrase the prosecution, William has already been abandoned by so many people in his life – parents, the state, the Marines, the country, the world. Do not abandon him again.”

The body bag was cold. Not as cold as the trash bin had been when it stopped raining, but this was cold. And loud. And dark. There were other bodies all around – real bodies, and they smelled. They shifted with the plane.

How long do they fly these? Do they fly them forever? Did I fall asleep when they landed and now I’m awake and they’re flying again? They do fly them forever. The cold hurt his ears and his eyes. There wasn’t enough air. He breathed very fast.

He wished for his scorpion saints.