Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

On the third day of the conference, he came back to the hotel to find a message from Philadelphia. “Your wife rang!!!” read the note at the front desk. “At 4:07 P.M… the marshals’ office rang her to let you know they have caught Nauss. He apparently was living in suburbia with a wife and children and they knew nothing about him.”

Jubilant, Bender told Walter the exciting news. “Rich, they caught him in Michigan, just like you said they would. And he was clean-shaven, just like I said.”

“This is good,” Walter said.

Bender said he needed to get back to the United States immediately. Walter said he understood, thinking to himself, It’s a good thing he’s going, because I’m on the verge of killing him.

America ’s Most Wanted had shown the Nauss episode twice in the past two years, and mentioned Nauss a couple more times, as did other TV shows, including The Phil Donahue Show in recent weeks. Marshals had traced down literally hundreds of dead-end tips in California, Montana, Washington State, Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, Delaware, and throughout Pennsylvania. But on November 2, out of the blue, a tipster called and said a man who resembled the Nauss bust on AMW lived in Michigan.

“I told them he was in Michigan years ago,” Walter sniffed.

The tip led marshals to Luna Pier, a small town on Lake Erie an hour south of Detroit, and a man who went by the name Richard Ferrer. Nauss, thirty-eight, had taken the alias from the name of a cell mate back in Graterford. He was living a quiet life in Luna Pier with a new wife and three young sons in a ranch house with three picture windows overlooking Lake Erie.

Marshals had pieced together his trail of deception.

The year after his escape, a gentlemanly, charming, solidly built Nauss, then thirty-two, met and married Toni Ruark, thirty-seven, a single mother and government clerk in Detroit. “Rick” introduced himself as a lonely orphan, divorced, an investor, the owner of fourteen lucrative rental properties, who had “moved to Michigan to try to get his life together.” When he told his life story-orphaned with five siblings after his father died in a car accident-his friends in Luna Pier said they felt so bad for him they didn’t press him for details.

Having grown up in an upper-middle-class home in suburban Philadelphia, it was easy for Nauss to shave his heavy biker’s beard, cut his hair short, and fit right into the middle-class town. “Rick Ferrer” was a devoted husband and father, and loved to take his buddies fishing on his twenty-seven-foot boat. The lonely town of 1,500 had only four police officers, who considered him an upstanding citizen.

“When she met him, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven he was so nice,” Toni’s father said. “I liked him, too.”

Though he had no job in Michigan, Rick cultivated the image of an easygoing, successful tradesman around town. He wore his trademark baseball cap, chinos, and long-sleeve flannel shirts (always long-sleeve, no matter what the weather) as he drove his pickup truck with the toolbox he used for repairs on his properties. Occasionally he took trips out of town and came home with rent money of $2,000 or $3,000. He bought a beachfront camp up in Brimley, Michigan, on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, for a vacation home, and started selling off the extra land in lots. Life was good.

At 8 P.M. Tuesday, Halloween Eve, Rick and Toni and the kids were driving home in the Chevy Suburban, still planning for the trick-or-treaters. Toni had fixed the kids’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes, carved pumpkins for the yard, hung a paper ghost in the window, and strewn tiny lighted pumpkins in a tree by the front door. Until the moment carloads of U.S. Marshals, guns drawn, surrounded the Suburban, she had no idea who her husband was.

The marshals handcuffed the docile, solidly built Nauss in front of his children. Then they handcuffed Toni to keep her under control, though she would not be charged. As Toni stood in shock, a state police sergeant pulled down Nauss’s plaid shirt. And there, extending almost from the shoulder to the elbow, was Nauss’s trademark tattoo, an enormous parrot. The parrot was crucial to confirming his identity. “Some of his tattoos had been altered, but not this one,” said Dennis Matulewicz of the U.S. Marshals’ office in Philadelphia. “He had a special fondness for the parrot.”

The parrot told a tale-of leading Pennsylvania’s most violent motorcycle gang, rape, murder, dismemberment, and prison escape-that none of his new family or friends could believe.

Looking at his wife and children, Nauss said, “Sorry. This is it.”

“He’s a changed man,” Toni Ferrer said as her life unraveled. “At least from what they tell me. He never beat me. He never beat the kids.” There was no Richard Ferrer, no investment properties, no rents to collect. A marshal in Detroit said he was a “classic Jekyll and Hyde,” a charmer who killed one woman and fooled another. Toni thought she’d found happiness only to find out she was a cover. “They just wonder when he’s coming back,” she said of her children. “I just told them the truth.”

Large amounts of cash were found in Nauss’s house, along with a number of false IDs. The marshals believed that Nauss had continued to work with his partner Vorhauer, probably in drug manufacture and distribution. The Detroit region was known for nearly two hundred biker gangs that would have helped the escaped fugitives resettle, they said, and surely it was more than coincidence that Luna Pier was only a hundred and ten miles south of Yale, Michigan, where Vorhauer had been operating a methamphetamine lab on a farm before his recapture four years earlier. Nauss was spotted by several witnesses riding a motorcycle near Vorhauer’s farm when the meth lab was busted.

Clamped in leg irons, Nauss was flown to Philadelphia on a chartered marshals jet. Bender returned immediately to Philadelphia, where marshals supervisor Tom Rappone asked him to take the booking photograph, as he had with Vorhauer, who had refused to look at him.

Nauss was friendly, amiably putting his hand on Bender’s shoulder. “Hey, you did that bust of me, right?”

“Yeah. How does it feel to be immortalized?” Bender felt completely at ease with the charming killer.

“I wish it was under better circumstances,” Nauss laughed, adding, “Didn’t you also play Vorhauer, my partner, on AMW?”

“You saw it?” AMW had asked Bender to play the hit man in a reconstruction of the case.

“Yes, but you’re better-looking than him. He’s ugly, isn’t he?”

They both laughed.

Within two days, Nauss was back in maximum-security Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the scene of his dramatic escape, to continue serving his life sentence for the 1977 murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Ann Landy. A Montgomery County judge gave him a light additional sentence of three and a half to seven years for escape, crediting him with time off for good behavior for his “rehabilitated life” in Michigan. Nauss was separated from his partner, Vorhauer, who was locked up more than a hundred miles away in Huntingdon State Prison in northern Pennsylvania, serving a twenty-to-forty-year term for armed robbery, plus seven years for escape.

Walter’s profile was eerily on the mark.

Nauss had a second car parked in his driveway.

“You got it right, Rich,” Bender said.

It was a Cadillac.

It was the second floor of the Customs House, one of those grand stone Depression-era buildings with a lighthouse motif borrowed from the Colossus of Rhodes. The heavy wood door was ajar, and the ASAC was talking about the goose-down jackets from China that came through Philadelphia International Airport. Murray had tipped them off to the scam-the “goose-down” parkas were stuffed with chicken feathers. They confiscated the contraband, made arrests, and locked up the case. Murray was their best informant.