Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

This was all her fault… if she hadn’t harangued him over the years about everything from his meds to his haircut to getting a job, he wouldn’t have had those murderous dreams or ever acted them out.

He still couldn’t take it in. How could he go through with it? True, in the dreams he’d actually enjoyed strangling the women… but in real life? No way.

Francis had an idea. Rousing himself out of his chair, he checked the front porch to ensure neither the Jehovah’s Witnesses nor the Amway reps were lurking, then went out to his mother’s car. He always kept meticulous records of mileage, oil changes, you name it. In fact, he’d kept every gas receipt along with every tune-up and oil change record for the last twelve years. Same for the tires.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. Nearly two thousand additional miles were logged on the odometer. It could only mean one thing. Francis did it. He drove from here, Marksville, Louisiana, to New York and back. Obviously in a murderous haze.

Had he been drugged? He felt groggy. Maybe the government had drugged him up for some reason. S.O.B.’s. But no way he’d let the government get the best of him… They weren’t going to drug him up, make him commit murders, and then frame him.

No way. Francis Merle McGinnis could certainly outthink the U.S. government. He had to think, and doing so, he became convinced his fingerprints would turn up on the crime scenes. The government probably knew he collected guns… and both Prentiss and Fallon were shot to death.

Should he hide all of them now? Was one of them the murder weapon? He could bury them in the backyard tonight. Wrap them in sheets and bury them. That’s what he would do. Bury his guns.

Was this part of their plan to frame him?

Think… Think!!! He commanded his brain to work.

He was in agony. Had two of his beautiful ladies died at his own hands? The pain was almost too much for him to bear.

Tears rolled down his face. Did he himself do it? True, he’d had dreams of killing Stockton after being rebuffed, but those were just dreams, weren’t they? Plus, in his dreams he never shot her; he’d dreamed he strangled her pretty white neck, not put a bullet through her brain.

He’d never disfigure a great beauty like that.

And then, there were the flowers he’d sent Prentiss. He’d gotten a form response. She didn’t even bother to thank him herself. Was it too much effort for her to pick up a pen? And he’d paid plenty for those flowers, too.

But he didn’t really expect Prentiss to blow their secret. Their love transcended the prying minds of her assistants, agents, and all the flunkies surrounding her, much less the general public itself.

He didn’t need a handwritten thank-you. She spoke to him that night on the airwaves and thanked him from the heart. Her eyes, which appeared to be looking into the camera but were really looking at him, had melted his soul.

He would never hurt her. Not intentionally, anyway… the dreams were just that, dreams. No matter how vivid… how lifelike… right?

But just in case, Francis got up and headed to the kitchen. Leaning back against the kitchen sink, he studied the kitchen table. His worst fears were realized. The table was a few inches out of place, he could tell, because the table’s legs were not sitting squarely inside the four indentations they made over time into the linoleum floor beneath it. Somebody had moved the table.

Dragging the kitchen dinette from the center of the floor, he turned back to where it had sat, knelt down on the floor, and placed his right hand between two of the linoleum squares. Lifting a four-by-five-foot block of linoleum upward revealed a crawlspace dug beneath the kitchen floor.

Francis crawled down into the space and pulled the dinette back over himself and the hole in the kitchen floor. He army-crawled the five feet or so to his cache of weapons and HCBs, to get rid of potential evidence.

There were over a hundred weapons down here and he’d lost count of the amount of ammunition he’d stockpiled over the years. Then of course, there were the Homemade Chemical Bombs.

Francis took great time and care creating them and when talking to friends online, he referred to them as his “babies.” He loved them all equally, he swore when asked, but his personal favorites were the ones he’d made of toilet bowl cleaner mixed with Drano and tinfoil, poured into a screw-top Coke bottle for just the right amount of pressure. He had at least twenty-five of them already prepared, but he still wasn’t sure he was sufficiently armed for the inevitable showdown to come.

After all, look at what had happened at Waco and David Koresh. Koresh thought he was ready too, until ATF blasted up in there.

Francis pulled the thin chain attached to a single lightbulb over his head. The bulb was wired into a series of two-by-fours running from underneath the kitchen stove above to the center of the dug-out room beneath the kitchen floor.

Although everything looked untouched, just as he’d left it the last time he was down here, looking around, Francis could sense a government intruder had been in his lair. Several of the long guns were laid out, just as he’d left them, on a wooden work table he’d brought down piece by piece and assembled by the light of the single bulb overhead. Before the murders, he’d always loved coming down here at all hours of the day and night, cleaning them, keeping them all on the ready.

Between his blackout the weeks of the murders, the vivid dreams about strangling his beloveds, the odometer reading, and the obvious tampering with his gun cache, Francis knew the truth. The papers were vague about the calibers. He hardly knew where to start. Could he leave all the guns here? Would it be safe? And more important… Which one was the murder weapon?

What he did for love.

EMORY DAVIS, MD, WAS ON DUTY THAT NIGHT WORKING THE GRAVEYARD shift. He was the newest medical examiner on the roster, and obsessed with dead bodies since childhood. It didn’t win him many friends in school, but it did land him the chief intern spot, and then a full-time position at one of the busiest morgues in the country. At this hour of the night, all his youthful fantasies were fulfilled.

Over the years, Emory had graduated from dissecting flies at play school to frogs in high school biology to exploring the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems of his own, individual, aged monkey in pre-med. Then… the ultimate… he was assigned an eighty-year-old male cadaver in med school. But it all paid off for Emory. He finally made it, landing here at murder central… the New York County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The diener, Jimmy the morgue assistant, hoisted the body onto the table, still shrouded in the white sheet, and unobtrusively left the autopsy room, waiting just outside the swinging doors until Emory called out for him. He was a tiny man who’d worked for New York County in the morgue for decades.

It always amazed Emory how Jimmy could single-handedly maneuver even the largest of the dead, some tipping the scales at nearly three hundred pounds, but he did it. It was all in the technique. Emory figured practice made perfect.

The sheet would have to be removed extremely carefully, just in case fibers or other evidence was still attached to the body. The majority of morgues, especially the older facilities, still sported the old porcelain or even marble tables. They were charming, true, in a nostalgic sort of way, but Emory much preferred working with the sleeker, modern versions.

And here in New York County, he had the top of the line. She was a beauty. The autopsy table itself was a waist-high, cold, spotless stainless steel fixture. Not a single scratch on her… yet.