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

Suddenly Walter, whose habit, like the anchorman of a relay, was to take the baton at the end, spoke up. He frowned and adjusted his owlish black glasses on his aquiline nose.

“If I might offer an opinion,” he began crisply, “the key to the case is the absence of the victim’s shoes and socks.”

Snyder nodded. “We know the missing footwear was significant. We just didn’t know how.”

Walter nodded. “There is no robbery, yet her white Reeboks and white athletic socks are missing. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Not waiting for an answer, he raised more questions:

“The crucial question is, what is the value of the killing? What did he propose to get? Since he didn’t sexually assault her, what value was it? He tells us by the absence of the shoes and socks. He doesn’t want money. She’s still wearing her wristwatch. He doesn’t want a fuck. He wants the shoes. He’s a foot fetishist.”

Murmurs swept the room.

“Do foot fetishists kill for it?” a police officer asked.

“No, not often,” Walter acknowledged. “A foot fetish is a paraphilia, a sexual deviance. Afraid to engage a living and breathing sex partner, the fetishist uses the shoe as a stand-in for anyone his imagination can conjure. He gains a secondary or tertiary level of sexual satisfaction through sniffing and feeling and touching and rubbing the shoe, and maybe masturbating with it on him.”

To titters of amusement, Walter said, “Foot fetishes may be bizarrely amusing, but they can be very powerful and damaging. This is why the Chinese bound their women’s feet into a shape they could slip their dick into, and there was so much resistance to change. The whole culture was bound by the power and fantasy of this fetish.”

Walter quickly sketched his view of the crime. The killer is obsessed with women’s shoes; he collects them, masturbates over them. In all likelihood, he probably can’t even sustain an erection around a real woman. “It’s the representation, not the reality, he craves.” He has noticed Wilson before and her white Reeboks. He’s probably never killed anyone before, but his fantasy is escalating from merely stealing someone’s shoes to confronting the wearer.

Lost in his fantasy, somewhat akin to the Gentleman Rapist, he believes himself irresistible to women. Once he reveals his charms she’s going to say, “Where have you been all my life.” A large, powerful man, he intimidates Wilson when he enters the computer room, finding her alone. “He tries to chat her up for sex, or to go somewhere with him, form some sort of relationship, and she refuses. Possibly he threatens her, things like, she’s a whore being there alone and this or that, he verbally assaults her to scare her. It doesn’t matter to him. Either way it’s just a vehicle to get what he wants. He may tell himself he wants sex, a conquest, but we fool ourselves. Really he knows the bottom line is the shoes and socks.”

Wilson, like many victims in this situation, tells him no, timidly or forcefully, maybe she tells him to go to hell. It doesn’t much matter. The response is fury-the fury that sparks attack, murder, and postmortem attack. “Intellectually he knows she’s not going to cooperate, but on the level of fantasy when she tells him to fuck off or whatever he has an explosive reaction to the indignity. He’s had a power loss, not the power gain he dreamed of, and he goes ballistic. This is the energy that fuels the crime.”

The killer assaults her in the computer room, beating her face and head with his fists and possibly weapons, causing her mortal agony and terror. “She’s screaming, pleading, and he has to shut her up so he strangles her.” He drags her corpse to the bottom of the stairwell, now his dark, private lair. “This is very sexual,” the forensic psychologist said, giving voice to his earlier thoughts. “In Freudian terms, it’s the vagina and you’re going down into it. It’s a sensuality independent of the fuck. He doesn’t want the fuck, he wants the shoes. He’ll sniff them up at home. The stairwell is a foreplay kind of entrée; it helps set the sexual context later. He took what he wanted for that. He didn’t want her tingly parts. He continues to beat her out of the anger of rejection of his fantasy, but really he wants the shoes. Basically, he needs to neutralize her so he can harvest from her what he wants. He does it and leaves.”

Leaving with the shoes and socks, the killer is flooded with a powerful feeling of success. The power-reassurance killer, seeking reassurance of his power, had repaired the assault to his pride and dignity and won. “He already got what he wanted, the shoes, so he triumphs.”

Walter turned and looked at Sergeant Snyder. “That murder scene also indicates a bit of a power-assertive guy who likes to dominate and control. A guy who lifts weights, exhibits macho power and strength with guns, hobbies such as karate.”

Walter realized the fellowship of detectives was having an impact on him he hadn’t expected. He thought the federal agents who lacked murder investigation experience were “quite brilliant in the questions they ask to keep me on beam.” He told the Los Angeles Times reporter, “Our value isn’t that we’re a bunch of fucking geniuses. It’s that we can call on each other.” As usual, Walter’s remarks required editing for the newspaper. They weren’t “super-geniuses,” he said, but they worked as a team.

Snyder was pleased with the session. “The profile fits my guy to a T,” he said. His guy was Dickson.

Walter smiled. “Check Dickson’s Army records, go back and interview his girlfriends, ex-wives, see if there were any problems with shoes.”

Fleisher was sitting at his desk in the Customs House, watching sailboats dodge oil tankers on the river. It was a lovely May morning, women were out in spring finery, and the boiled brown water in the blue paper cup emblazoned with the Parthenon almost tasted like coffee. The mood in the office was light, as it was when the ASAC interspersed fighting the war on drugs with practicing his standup:

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

I’m making a Jewish porn movie. It’s 10 percent sex, 90 percent guilt.

Someone stole my wife’s credit card, but I don’t want him found. He’s spending less than she was.

“Bill,” his secretary called, “we got another one who saw you on 48 Hours. Says he’s been looking all over the city trying to find the guy who looks like Raymond Burr.”

Fleisher chuckled. “I’m not that fat yet. Maybe by autumn.”

The soft Texas accent on the phone belonged to Jim Dunn, CEO of a marketing company in Bucks County.

“Mr. Fleisher, my son Scott disappeared in Texas. He was murdered, and I’ve been investigating myself for a year, trying to help the police, getting nowhere. When I saw 48 Hours, we were in New Mexico following a lead at the end of our rope and I said to my wife, the Vidocq Society is back home, in Philadelphia. I thought I’d see if it was at all possible for me to talk to these experts on homicide.”

Fleisher was impressed with Jim Dunn. He sounded like a gentleman, highly intelligent, and a brokenhearted father.

“I went to the City Tavern three times asking about the Vidocq Society and the bearded fellow who looked like Raymond Burr. Finally a bartender said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a boss in charge over at Customs.’ ”

Fleisher’s voice turned serious. “Jim, tell me what happened to your son.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Scott and I were very close; we talked on the phone every Sunday. I hadn’t heard from him one Sunday last May when a woman I’d never heard of called me at home very late and asked me if I was Scott Dunn’s father. She said she was Scott’s girlfriend, his live-in girlfriend, and she was worried because he was missing. Their bedroom had been emptied out-no mattress, none of Scott’s clothes, nothing.”