Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

Maynard measured the body. Carol Sue Spencer had been five feet four inches tall. The examination table had a built-in scale that showed a weight of 132 pounds. The doctor cut the cable tie from around her neck and passed it to Murphy. Beneath the tie, the skin was deep purple. Spencer’s eyes were open and filled with blood. Her tongue was dark and swollen.

Dr. Maynard examined and probed for half an hour.

The rectal wounds were horrific.

“It’s my understanding that you recovered a knife from the scene,” Maynard said.

Murphy nodded. “A butcher’s knife.”

The doctor nodded as he lifted Spencer’s left leg with one hand and used a thin stainless steel rod to probe her shredded rectum. The rod was marked like a ruler.

Murphy looked at his shoes.

“I would say he penetrated the anus at least a dozen times,” Maynard said. “The deepest puncture reaches a good ten inches into the sigmoid colon.”

“Was she alive?”

The doctor nodded. His face was sweating and his safety glasses had slid midway down his nose. “I’d have to say yes. She may not have been conscious when these wounds were inflicted, but she was alive.”

Maynard picked up a scalpel from a side table and prepared to gut Carol Sue Spencer. His first incision ran from shoulder to shoulder across her sternum. Then he sliced down the midline of her torso to the pubic bone. He peeled Spencer’s flesh back from her chest and abdomen and exposed her rib cage.

He laid the bloody scalpel down and picked up a pair of rib cutters. The cutters reminded Murphy of pruning shears. After snapping through each rib, Maynard lifted out the front of Spencer’s rib cage as a single piece, like pulling out the grill on a car.

Maynard and his technician cut out Spencer’s organs, weighed them, then placed them in a pair of organ buckets that stood at the head of the examination table. Each bucket was lined with a red plastic biohazard bag.

The smell was nauseating.

“She was a smoker,” Maynard said. He held up one of Spencer’s lungs for Murphy to see. A light dusting of tiny black pellets covered the tissue. “That’s tar from cigarettes.”

Murphy had seen it before. Maynard was a reformed smoker and he liked to show everyone what smoking did to the lungs. But Spencer’s lung tissue, aside from the scattering of tar, was still a healthy pink. In older, lifelong smokers whom Murphy had seen cut open, the tissue was gray and crusted over with gobs of sticky black tar.

Maynard spent a long time examining Spencer’s colon from the inside of her abdomen. “I don’t think she bled to death,” he finally said. “There is no major arterial damage.”

“So it was strangulation?”

Maynard, whose head was jammed halfway into Spencer’s open torso, nodded. “Preliminary findings only, but I think so.”

Then it was the children’s turn on the table, the little girl first. Maynard took about forty-five minutes with each one. The kids were beyond caring what happened to them, but for Murphy the child autopsies were torture. He stepped back and leaned against the wall, as far from the examination table as he could get.

While Maynard poked, prodded, cut, and peeled, he kept up a running commentary. Everything he saw, the doctor said, was consistent with what the detectives concluded at the crime scene. The little girl had died from suffocation, most likely with her own pillow. The boy died from manual strangulation.

“Due to a lack of blood present in the area of the torn rectal tissue, coupled with the lack of swelling,” Maynard said into the microphone, “I’d say the sexual assault occurred postmortem. The rape kit will confirm, but I did not detect the presence of semen. The faint trace of a latex smell leads me to suspect the perpetrator used a condom.”

Maynard’s mention of a condom reminded Murphy of something. They had found no used condoms or open packages at the crime scene, but there had been condoms in the house. In the master bedroom, downstairs, a two-drawer nightstand had been emptied, the contents dumped on the floor.

Other than the bodies, the nightstand was the only thing that had been disturbed inside the house. Several unopened condoms were lying on the floor next to a small overturned wicker basket.

To Murphy, only one explanation fit the facts. The killer got a hard-on while he strangled the little boy. He ran downstairs into the mother’s bedroom, found a basket of condoms, then rushed back upstairs and raped the boy’s dead body.

The killer was branching out, expanding his victim profile. Beefing up patrols where street-walking prostitutes tended to gather wasn’t going to do any good. The murder of Carol Sue Spencer and her two children had been as much of a message as the killer’s letter to the Times-Picayune. He was boasting that he could strike anywhere he wanted, and the police were powerless to stop him. No one was safe. Not even children.

To catch him, Murphy realized, he had to get inside the killer’s head. He had to figure out how the killer operated and how he selected his victims. He had to think like the killer.

Wednesday, August 1, 12:10 PM

Murphy stepped outside of the coroner’s makeshift office and squinted in the harsh sunlight. It made his head hurt.

His cell phone rang. It was the secretary from the Homicide office. Captain Donovan wanted to see him right away.

On the way to the office, Murphy stopped at the Coffee House on Canal Boulevard near the railroad tracks. He was in no hurry to see the captain. He bought a large cup of black coffee and a newspaper. Kirsten’s article was on the top of the front page.

SERIAL KILLER CONFIRMED!

Killer sends letter, proof to newspaper

NOPD confirms existence of serial killer

By Kirsten Sparks, The Times-Picayune

The Times-Picayune received a package yesterday from someone who police say may be responsible for as many as eight recent homicides in New Orleans.

The package contained a letter and an item allegedly taken from a recent murder scene. The New Orleans Police Department is working to confirm the legitimacy of the item, which investigators consider a crucial piece of evidence, but they have asked the Times-Picayune not to further describe that item. In the letter, the killer took credit for at least two recent killings and suggested responsibility for more, though the letter writer did not give an exact number.

The letter, which the killer insisted the newspaper print within two days, also contained what the killer described as a code that gives clues to his or her identity and the reasons for the killings.

Times-Picayune editors are considering whether to reprint the letter tomorrow but had not reached a decision as of press time.

Shortly after receiving the package in the mail, the Times-Picayune notified police officials, who dispatched Detective Juan Gaudet and Lt. Carl Landry to the newspaper’s offices on Howard Avenue to collect the original letter, packaging, and the item of evidence.

Assistant Chief of Police Larry DeMarco confirmed yesterday that homicide detectives now believe several recent killings are linked to the same killer, though DeMarco would not be specific about how many.

DeMarco’s admission stands in stark contrast to statements made just…

The rest of the story was an anal exam of the police department’s crawfishing on the serial killer. Kirsten hadn’t pulled any punches. One of DeMarco’s more poorly thought-out comments even suggested the department had known there was a serial killer all along but had publicly denied it in order to get the upper hand on the killer, which is exactly what Murphy had told Kirsten the rank would say.

Murphy reread DeMarco’s idiotic comment. “In order to maintain the integrity of our investigation,” DeMarco said, “we did not immediately disclose everything we knew about those particular cases to the public because we did not want the killer to know exactly how much information we had. We even compartmentalized some of that information within our own staff, to include the investigative component.”