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

INVESTIGATOR EXPECTS TO CRACK DUNN CASE.

Walter had confidently declared that Lubbock police would soon solve the case of Dunn’s disappearance. After spending one day studying the case, interviewing suspects, and talking to police, Walter promised that the “nasty and clever” killers’ eighteen months of gloating would soon come to an end. His analysis of the murder indicated that the killers were “smart” but made “mistakes.” They unknowingly revealed their patterns to him, leaving “trails, bits and pieces” that would be their undoing.

“Success will be based on two things,” he said. “A) The case merits success, and B) I don’t like losing a case. I have a bulldog mentality, and what I want to hear are handcuffs, and I want to do it right… If I were the suspect, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

Now at eight o’clock that morning in December 1992, Walter sat down with a police corporal, sergeant, and detective to discuss the Dunn case. The thin man looked fresh and energized in his blue suit, his blue eyes shining above the French tricolor pin on his lapel. Tal English, the tall, twenty-seven-year-old detective, had an aw-shucks manner that matched his sandy hair and cowboy boots; he and Walter had bonded working the case for months over the telephone. The older man had croaked, “Young man, we’re going to go into the jaws of hell and bring this case back out.” Corporal George White, distinguished-looking with gray in his dark hair, and Sergeant Randy McGuire, large and bald, sat stoically appraising the profiler. They all got along in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but the two veteran cops had not seen eye to eye with the “super sleuth” from the Vidocq Society in their previous meeting.

After the cops’ courteous Texas welcome, which Walter always appreciated, he got right to his point: They should immediately take the case to District Attorney Travis Ware and press for murder charges. Walter wanted the charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and her neighbor and lover Tim Smith, fiercely jealous of Scott, whom he believed was an accomplice.

Corporal White and Sergeant McGuire took a long look at the man from Philadelphia. The case had been a top priority for a year. Jim Dunn was a hometown boy, a hall-of-fame alumnus of local Texas Tech; his best friend was still his old college roommate W. R. Collier, president of the largest locally owned bank in Lubbock. There was great public interest in the gruesome disappearance of a prodigal son in a cloud of sex, blood, and duct tape, and the police had invested thousands of man-hours. Murders were relatively rare in the Texas city of 186,000 people, but they were reading about this one over coffee from Plainview to Dallas to Jacksonville, Florida. The police wanted nothing more than to solve it. They liked Walter, and he them-“they were all great guys”-but they just couldn’t see how a petite, charming twenty-eight-year-old woman had orchestrated a vast conspiracy of lies and cold-blooded murder.

Walter tried to convince them.

“This case is like shaking hands with smoke,” he said. “It’s a matter of you can see it, you can smell it and taste it, but it’s difficult to get your hands around it.”

Walter urged them to look at the crime scene, the killing room with blood halfway up the walls and splattered on the ceiling. They all agreed Scott Dunn had no doubt died in that room. The point of departure was that with no body and no weapon there was no case, according to the police. Without that foundation of physical evidence, it wasn’t possible to bring murder charges under Texas law, as the DA never tired of reminding them.

Walter saw it differently. “I say, OK, we don’t have a body. Its absence is a clue. Let’s use that to move forward.”

The problem, as he privately saw it, was that “cops are concrete. They think in structure. The whole investigative process is structural, and wisely so. Traditionally, you work from the inside out on a case. You work from the evidence forward. Here you don’t have a body, you don’t have the primary evidence; that’s it, end of story. So in this case one must work from the outside, the pathology, back to the crime scene.” He smiled to himself at the small irony that it was eccentric Eugène François Vidocq, in nineteenth-century Paris, who first had the gall to reveal broader and deeper patterns to the straight-thinking gendarmes.

“The police are correct in that what we have at the crime scene is vital,” he said to himself. “One must always remain rooted in the facts of the case, but one must think differentially, not just linearly. Unfortunately, there are not many people who are capable of it.”

He took a sip of his coffee, which was already cold. “Sometimes, gentlemen,” he said, “what’s missing is more important than what’s present.” He held up the photograph of the blood-soaked room revealed by the luminol. “What’s here and what’s not here?” he asked. “A minimalist version of the crime is left, but the essence remains.

“Something dire happened in this room,” he continued. “It was a bloodbath, and the careful cleanup speaks to a very careful, elaborate plot. The murder is very purposeful, not recreational.” At the word “recreational” eyebrows rose, and he explained: “A Bundy type who chose a random victim and killed for sadistic pleasure would have left a far messier, more symbolic crime scene. So the killers knew Scott.” He let that sink in a moment.

“As it happens, the carefully organized crime, cleanup, and the brutal destruction and disposal of the body point to a power-assertive, or PA, killer,” he went on. “It’s a recognizable type I’ve dealt with many, many times. The killing is all about power-not the acquisition of power through fantasy but a John Wayne-type power, the macho direct assault-simple, in-your-face, incapacitate, restrain, torture, kill, throw away. ‘I win, you lose’ kind of power.” A cold smile crossed Walter’s face. “The whole thing just reeks of PA at all levels.”

He asked them to examine Scott and Leisha’s relationship. Scott was twenty-four, a ladies’ man, handsome, bright, cocky. He would have seen Leisha as a stimulating challenge. She was an older woman, also very bright, sexy, flippant, and “fun in the sack, without giving much thought to her essential character as a manipulative, Mata Hari figure.

“Leisha had a long litany of situation lovers, husbands, one-night stands, wanted and unwanted children,” he continued. “She had six children without knowing who was the father of several of them.” His voice took on a sarcastic edge. “She told police she only loved the ones conceived in love.” He paused to let that take root.

“Leisha would have seen Scott also as a challenging conquest, and a link to money, his father’s wealth. But like a lot of twenty-four-year-old men, Scott had found someone to take to bed, not home to meet Mom and Dad. Scott was rebuilding his life, and when he found a ‘decent’ girl, the real thing, it was time to dump Leisha Hamilton.”

The day Scott’s would-be fiancée called and Leisha answered the phone sealed his fate. “Nobody dumps Leisha Hamilton. Oh, no.”

Walter’s complexion took on a grave cast. “When we look at Leisha’s history, we recognize that she absolutely cannot stand rejection, that loss of control. She has a series of short-term relationships which are not monogamous because she needs not so much to conquer men as emasculate them. Scott is a relatively strong-willed man himself. He sees this rather malevolent, vixenish woman whom one wouldn’t mind having an affair with, but he wouldn’t want to introduce her to his parents. Now he has Jessica and he’s gathering strength. He doesn’t need Leisha anymore. If anything is going to get you killed, it’s to reject the psychopath and say, ‘I’m better than you are.’ ”