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

Paralyzed but still alive, she must have heard the killer foraging in the restaurant supply area. He returned with the clear plastic trash bag, and wrapped it completely around her neck and head. It was Fillinger who noted the condensation inside the bag, indicating Brooks was still breathing and looking up at her attacker as he asphyxiated her.

As the corpse hovered above them in the gray light of afternoon, tall, broad-shouldered ex-major-crime homicide detective Ed Gaughan’s lantern jaw flushed in contrast to his sandy hair, the only sign he gave that he wanted to take someone out. Gaughan was friends with Sergeant Cloud, who had shared his frustration with the Brooks case while the two were watching their sons play football for Pennsbury High School. Gaughan convinced Sergeant Cloud to bring the case before the Vidocq Society.

The Falls Township Police Department threw all its resources at the crime, Cloud said. The killing made headlines in the local newspapers, and the Marriott Corporation put up a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. It quickly became evident to police that it was a “robbery gone wrong”-terribly wrong. Brooks had interrupted the robbery in progress and tried to stop it, triggering her death.

Looking for the robber who, facing resistance, had become a murderer, police interviewed fifty past and present restaurant employees. They zeroed in on an employee whom Brooks had discovered stealing from the cash drawer, and another employee at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Philadelphia who had threatened her. Both were cleared. They talked to an old boyfriend in California, and ruled him out.

They tried to link Brooks’s killing to a spate of similarly violent fast-food robberies in the region and beyond. In April 1985 at a Philadelphia Roy Rogers only twenty miles away, fourteen months later, the day manager opened up to find the night manager stabbed to death, the safe empty. They contacted police in Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, where similar crimes had occurred, and interrogated suspects in all similar robberies they could find. On the tenth anniversary of the crime, a local television station crime watch program featured the case. The police received “lots of calls and our investigators ended up all over the place,” to no avail.

Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, Sergeant Cloud concluded his presentation. “We appreciate your ears,” he said. “We also appreciate your brains.” The room seemed to exhale, gathering itself for the inquiry. The first suggestions from Vidocq members focused on DNA testing, a technology unknown in 1984. Could the killer’s DNA be harvested from the victim’s body and articles found at the scene, including the knife and hair follicles in her hand? Cloud would look into it.

Fleisher, Bender, Walter, Gaughan, and Fred Bornhofen whispered among themselves and called out their opinions almost as one. The consensus was the police department had botched the focus of the case from the beginning, fourteen years earlier.

“Initially the investigators seemed to have gone after robbers,” Gaughan said. “Any time somebody was locked up who had committed a robbery like that, they were there interrogating the guy. They basically didn’t focus the investigation properly. A robber wants money, to get in and get out; he’ll kill if he has to but this was a more complex type of murder.”

Bornhofen wrote later, “It’s overkill and not the type of murder done by a robber. Even a rank amateur like me could see the case for what it was.”

Gaughan, looking sympathetically at his friend Sergeant Cloud, said the police had to start over. They had to interview everyone again, as if Terri Brooks had just been killed. This time, the Vidocq Society would be there to help.

Walter stood. “My colleagues are quite right. Robbers don’t swath the head of a victim in plastic. As it happens, this is the peculiar signature of a very complicated and dark personality subtype. It’s not a robbery at all. It’s a murder. The murderer staged the robbery to throw the police off. He succeeded, until now. We know quite a lot about the killer already.”

Walter paused. “In the information game, answers are meaningless. You have to ask the right questions, and the question is: Who cared enough to kill her three times?”

His rakish smile pierced the gloom.

“For whom did Terri Brooks unlock the door?”

The sweet hymn to Jesus awakened Walter abruptly. He was snoozing in the parlor of his Greek Revival mansion when the glorious notes of “Lift High the Cross” floated in on the spring air. He put on his glasses and stood on the porch glaring at the offending Gothic tower of St. Paul ’s Episcopal Church, diagonally across the street. It was time to teach the Episcopalians a lesson.

Wearing jeans and a red sport shirt, he pulled the Briggs amp; Stratton mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and mowed the front lawn-as he did every Sunday when the choir reached full song, whether the grass needed it or not. He was “quite pleased” as the rattling old mower drowned out the choir, and the clatter crossed the street to the opened stained-glass windows of the stone church. “The Episcopalians are perfectly loathsome neighbors,” he later wrote to a friend. “When they get going on Sunday I must answer back with as loud a noise as I can muster.”

“Have you finished being psychopathic yet?” Stoud grinned as he stepped on the porch, where the thin man was sitting, his face a sheen of sweat, sipping an iced tea in the sudden quiet of a late spring morning.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it, that people want to sing in church on Sunday morning?”

“Indeed.” Walter laughed. “As you know, I don’t make a very good victim. And I’m not feeling terribly charitable toward Christians at the moment.”

Walter had just returned from Lubbock, Texas, where he’d watched Tim Smith, a devout Evangelical Christian, be tried for the murder of Scott Dunn as Leisha Hamilton’s accomplice, a year after Hamilton was convicted of Dunn’s murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Smith’s attorney had portrayed the cold-blooded killer as a clean-cut, young, Christian family man, with a wife and three-year-old son, who had never done wrong until he met the conniving Hamilton. Members of Smith’s church had mobbed the courthouse, calling for Christians all over the city to pray for him to be found innocent. “The nincompoops filled the courthouse wailing that the killer was an exemplary fellow in church,” Walter said. “It had an effect on the trial. It wasn’t good.”

Smith, thirty-five years old, slim and blond, was a poetic, submissive young man who had been easily seduced by Hamilton, who “used men like you use a handkerchief,” prosecutors said. He trailed Hamilton around like a lovesick sophomore, following her to the Copper Kettle just to look at her work as a waitress, and deluging her with love letters filled with jealousy of Scott. Smith believed if Scott Dunn “was out of the way everything would be bliss and happiness” with the woman he loved, according to the state.

Smith had been deeply involved in the murder for some forty-eight hours, prosecutors said. He cut away sections of blood-soaked carpet from the bedroom to hide evidence, helped wrap Scott’s body in rolled-up carpet with duct tape, helped dispose of the body and clean up the crime scene. Fibers from the bloody carpet were found on a roll of duct tape in Smith’s apartment.

According to Walter, Hamilton set Smith up to take the fall in an old-fashioned murderer’s scam.

After the killing, while Leisha was toying with the cops, playing the role of a wronged but helpful young woman, she moved in with Tim Smith to finish setting up the dupe.