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

Whitney returned to the room and three or four minutes later emerged with a report. “As soon as I turned the chair and sat across from him, his head went down, his body gave in, and he admitted he killed her for money to buy drugs.”

Gordon nodded. “Good work. Now I want you to go back in and take a statement, name, birth, graduated, such and such-start from the beginning and then everything he did that night. I want it written down he’s confessing of his own free will, no threats or promises of anything. Ask him, why did he confess? In court it’ll be attacked-why would a person voluntarily give a confession against his own interests? So we need him to write down what his interests are-why did he confess?”

Whitney went back in. Minutes passed, the door stayed shut. The group in the hall fidgeted nervously.

Half an hour later he came out waving a handwritten confession and cheers went up in the hallway, louder now. The DA and deputy DA, the chief, Sergeant Cloud and his officers, and Gordon, Fleisher, and Gaughan were shaking hands, slapping backs, high fives all around. The Vidocq men felt excited to be part of the team. Rivalries and criticisms melted away instantly with success; they were all human, it was a natural part of the process. The VSMs said the cops had done a great job.

The charge would be first-degree murder, the DA said with an air of triumph. The deputy DA grinned as she studied the written confession.

“Didn’t these cops do a great job?” she said.

Later that morning, the DA held a press conference to announce an arrest in the county’s longest-running cold case. Surrounded by beaming cops, Rubenstein praised the police chief and his officers and their “dogged” and “high-tech” work. “These things don’t happen by accident,” he said. “It takes good police work. You can’t imagine the man- and woman-hours put into this.” Headlines in all the regional papers sung their praises. Betty Brooks said she was shocked but “relieved” and applauded the wonderful police work. The New York Times saw the arrest as nationally significant because of the use of a daring new technology; as the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “What really cracked the case were the DNA tests the police had done.” Chief Conoline noted that coroner Halbert E. Fillinger Jr. was “a great pathologist” for having flawlessly saved the skin and hair samples that provided the DNA evidence. A week later, the Families of Unsolved Murders Victims, a local support group, honored Detective Sergeant Cloud, Officer Whitney, and Deputy District Attorney Lori Markle for their outstanding achievement. Rubenstein said he would seek the death penalty.

Nowhere was the Vidocq Society mentioned.

Sixteen months later, on June 5, 2000, Bucks County judge John J. Rufe sentenced Keefe to life in prison without parole for the murder of Terri Brooks. Keefe had pled guilty on the advice of his attorney, who said the evidence against him was so “overwhelming” the most they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty. Keefe refused to address Brooks’s parents directly, who said they were not surprised, and were satisfied with the outcome. In a related civil case, the Marriott Corporation, owners of Roy Rogers, paid Brooks’s sister, the administrator of her estate, $675,000 in a wrongful death settlement; $276,322 of the settlement went to the attorneys.

Nowhere were VSMs mentioned.

Fleisher admitted his disappointment in a Vidocq Society Journal column, headlined, WE KNOW WHAT WE DO… AND DID.

He praised the Falls Township Police Department, and especially Sergeant Cloud, now a Vidocq Society Member, for its “great work.” Yet, “It still hurts me that members who selflessly volunteer their time and expertise are not always publicly appreciated,” he wrote. “Whoever said, ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan,’ knew of what he was speaking.”

Fleisher said the case was a reminder to VSMs to “stop and remember what we are really about in the Vidocq Society and who is our ultimate client. The client was, is, and will always be the truth. And our client is an unforgiving one.”

He signed the column:

Bill Fleisher, VSM, Commissioner.

Veritas Veritatum (“Truth begets Truth”).

In the darkness before dawn in her Ohio home, Mary turned in the coils of a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was sweating. She got up and went into the kitchen, but the nightmare followed her. Even in waking hours now, she couldn’t escape it. She tried to calm herself, apply reason to the problem. She was in her fifties, a scientist, a Ph.D. chemist with a logical, orderly mind that had fueled an impressive executive career at one of America ’s largest pharmaceutical companies. “I was always good in the sciences,” she said. “You can trust science. It yields up its secrets, if one keeps looking. Science can play tricks, but it doesn’t lie.” But this problem didn’t respond to logic; it was at the farthest end of the spectrum from reason. She lived alone. It was terrifying. The horror had trailed her her whole life, but she’d managed to repress it. Now this demon of memory was demanding notice. The ghostly hollow eyes stared back, wherever she looked.

Before sunup, she picked up the phone and called her psychiatrist.

Early that morning of February 25, 2000, the psychiatrist called from his Cincinnati office to the Philadelphia Police Department and asked for homicide. He had a murder to report. Or rather, his patient, who had been wrestling with the memory in therapy for many years, had a murder to report, forty-three years after the fact. Her brother had been killed on February 25, 1957, by her mother. She had witnessed it, been an accomplice to it. She needed to unburden her soul.

The officer took the information. The report was filed with the hundreds of other leads that had come in, especially after the America ’s Most Wanted episode.

Kelly and McGillen were struck by the dates, surely more than coincidence. Mary called in her confession on the anniversary of the murder of the Boy in the Box. It was exactly forty-three years after the boy was killed. The memory of her brother was haunting her, she said. She wanted to talk to the police. Sergeant Augustine, and VSMs Kelly and Joe McGillen called the psychiatrist to see if the woman would come to Philadelphia. No. Perhaps the cops could travel to Cincinnati. No. Suddenly, the woman panicked. She said she couldn’t talk about it. Not yet.

Kelly and McGillen kept in touch with the psychiatrist. They wrote on Vidocq Society stationery. They called. Not yet, the psychiatrist said. He refused to press his patient. She had to volunteer it, he said. She had to heal. It was a tremendous leap of faith to decide to go public. Suddenly the psychiatrist cut off all communication with the Vidocq Society; his patient was regressing. Kelly and McGillen were polite, understanding. Fleisher was stunned by their persistence, “classic shoe-leather stuff, great old-fashioned detective work.” But like the previous half century of efforts on the case, nothing had come of it.

Mary needed more time, years more time, to sort it out.

When a weary Frank Bender picked up the phone in his studio and heard the voice of a young New York detective excited about an impossible murder case, he was tempted to say, “The wizard is not in. No miracles will be performed tonight.” But Keith Hall, the twenty-five-year-old detective from Manlius, a small town outside of Syracuse, said that after banging his head against the impenetrable cold case for two years he’d just had a revelation. He knew that nobody on earth could solve the murder but Frank Bender of Philadelphia.