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

The police were “absolutely gobsmacked” by the murder, Walter said. It defied logic. There was no break-in, no robbery, no sexual assault. The popular young woman had no enemies who would want to kill her. The FBI was brought in to study the case, to no avail. Maria’s parents, the prominent Chicago physician Dr. Richard Caleel, and former model Annette, hired private eyes, and personally provided most of a $50,000 reward.

As the years passed with no arrests, the Caleels did everything in their power to keep the case and their daughter’s name alive. They donated a small fortune to create Maria Caleel funds and scholarships across the country-a Maria Caleel polo trophy at the Oak Brook Polo Club; Maria Caleel conferences on violence against women; a Maria Caleel University of Missouri journalism school award; Maria Caleel horse shows, equine research grants, a Maria Caleel prize for the best biology student at Brown. Finally, the Caleels asked their family-friend Lynn Abraham, the renowned Philadelphia district attorney and VSM, for advice. The DA recommended a Vidocq Society investigation.

Walter had sparred at times with Illinois investigators, using lines such as “I fully respect your constitutional right to be wrong, nonetheless…” But now his voice purred as he coolly described the killer as a young man in the vet school and friend of Caleel’s who bore a psychopathological anger toward her for her “relatively innocent college student flirtations.”

The signs of a murderer who killed neatly and efficiently “in a manner of disposing of trash” to correct a perceived wrong were evident at the scene. The killer’s precision with the knife was no accident given his anatomical skill with animals. With a misogynistic hatred, Walter said, “His thought process was thus: I didn’t realize she was a disgusting and despicable whore, but I’m responsible for her, and I’ll clean up the mess. So he killed her.” Walter raised an eyebrow. “With no one else among the forty suspects,” he explained, “can one draw a straight line connecting the crime and pre-crime and post-crime behavior? This guy is the lemons falling into place-the jackpot.”

At first skeptical, police grew enthusiastic and were finally stunned by the analysis emerging from billows of menthol smoke. They talked about zeroing in on the killer, now a prominent man with a wife and children, and unearthing his secret of fourteen years. It would not be easy, but the Vidocq Society would advise each step of the way.

“Are the police happy with our work? ” Fleisher asked later when Walter called to report in.

The thin man began to laugh. “Oh, yes. They’re as happy as a pervert with two dicks.”

As Walter worked the Illinois murder, two of the oldest Vidocqeans reached Ohio on a Sunday night, pulling a big American sedan into a Cincinnati hotel in time for dinner. Bill Kelly and Joe McGillen had left Philadelphia that morning right after mass, with city homicide detective Tom Augustine sharing the wheel during the nine-hour drive. Time had not been kind to the Vidocq senior investigative team. VSM Sam Weinstein, the third retired Philly cop on the Boy in the Box team, was in Israel working with the Israel Defense Forces. The widower McGillen, fearless on a murder, was deathly afraid to fly, thus the 600-mile drive. Kelly had spent the long drive quietly praying for a break in the half-century-old case, fearful he too was running out of time. After another year of beseeching God for help, he’d attended the St. Joseph ’s Seminary annual retreat, the weekend that kept him sane. Steeped in prayer, he asked a sister to help him ask God for a solution to the case, and she replied that she had been asking. Her words haunted him: “Maybe God said no.”

The next morning, the three of them were seated stiffly in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist was a tall man with wavy white hair. None of the cops had ever been in a shrink’s office. Kelly had teased McGillen in the car: “Maybe you want to confess this flying phobia of yours.” Now, after setting some ground rules, the psychiatrist led them into an inner room, and introduced them to a middle-aged woman, sitting at a table, they would call “Mary.” Mary was a tall, handsome woman with unusually broad shoulders and keenly intelligent eyes. She seemed nervous, yet also distant. She demanded her identity be protected; she was an executive at one of the largest drug companies in the world, and “they mustn’t know.” The old cops nodded their promises. She breathed deeply to compose herself. “Oh, God,” she said, “this is so hard.”

Two years after her psychiatrist first contacted the police, and fifty years after witnessing the horrors that had scarred her for life, Mary was finally willing to talk about the murder of her brother Jonathan, the Boy in the Box.

“No one outside our house could have imagined what went on… My parents did not have normal sexual desires. My father molested me… My mother didn’t just silently let it happen, the usual scenario. She was enthusiastic about it, even joined in. The agreement was that my father let her indulge her taste in little boys. She preferred them to adult men because she thought them purer, somehow… One night a little boy came into our lives…”

It was a hot August night, she remembered. “I was thirteen when my mother took me in the car to get him.”

Kelly bent his head to his maker and the weight of the words, and scribbled notes on a pad.

Between them, Kelly and McGillen had nearly a century of investigative experience, and as Mary rambled on, both men felt in their guts she was telling the truth. Mary was highly credible and had no reason to lie. This was the real story, at last. It was horrifying, Augustine thought. It was a story that even Hitchcock would have been afraid to film.

On the surface, as Mary told it, her childhood in the 1950s on the Main Line of Philadelphia was one of comfort and privilege. She lived in a house in Lower Merion, a lovely, affluent town, an only child of highly educated, well-respected parents. Her father was a teacher at the high school, one of the better public schools on the East Coast. Her mother was a librarian.The students loved her parents;“I bet my parents autographed a thousand yearbooks,” she said.

But in the privacy of their home, life was a horror from which Mary could not awaken. At thirteen, Mary knew in her heart something was wrong, but she was unable to fully face it, couldn’t begin to understand it. That August night when her mother parked in front of a row house in Philadelphia, she rang the bell, gave the woman an envelope apparently filled with money, and was handed a baby who had peed his diapers. Mary, excited, confused, scared, held the baby in the car. She didn’t mind the smell; she felt a sudden sympathy for the helpless child. She could feel that “this baby, this little human being, needed me. Needed somebody.”

She asked her mother, “Can he be my brother?”

“Sure,” her mother said. “Only we can’t keep him upstairs.” Her mother put the baby in the basement in a small room that used to be a coal bin. He had a box to sleep in, some blankets, and heavy dishes like dog dishes. A drain was his toilet. Mary thought, It’s just like we got a new puppy. Her mother called him Jonathan. She went down to visit Jonathan and play with him. She took food and water down to him. He always had coal dust in his hair. She got him to laugh once. Jonathan never said a word. She realized he was retarded.

Her mother said, “Don’t go down there.”

Jonathan’s hair grew long, like a girl’s. His parents never cut it. They never took him outside. When Mary was fifteen, feeling weighted now with a terrible secret, her mother dragged Jonathan upstairs for a bath, “cursing… his feet going thump, thump, thump on the steps as she dragged him along.” She put him in a bath that was scorching hot and he started screaming. She took him out of the tub and he was crying and stamping his feet. She put him back in the water and he threw up their baked-beans dinner. “My mother shrieked like I’d never heard before. She yanked him out of the tub and slapped him. I mean hard.” He cried but she kept slapping until he fell and hit his head on the bathroom floor and then she was punching him all over with her fists. “My mother’s head was shaking from side to side, she was swinging so fast.”