Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

Mayor Ray Guidry, flanked by a host of stern-faced city officials, announces that Catherine has strengthened into a category-two hurricane with sustained winds of one hundred miles per hour. Computer models project the storm will pass through the Florida Straits and deliver only a glancing blow to Miami. It will then pound the Florida Keys and skirt the northern coast of Cuba. Without making landfall, the storm will not weaken before it enters the Gulf of Mexico, which it is expected to do late Sunday.

The mayor ends his prepared remarks by declaring, “I am asking the governor to activate the National Guard, and I will be coordinating with the state Office of Emergency Preparedness on a possible evacuation of the city.”

Finally, with the storm news over, someone asks the mayor about the video.

News of the Internet video of the woman’s death broke this afternoon. Since then, the cable news networks have gone berserk. Their prime-time crime hosts, Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, and the backbenchers, have been on the air for three hours discussing the outrageous video with their “experts” and demanding government action to shut down the overseas Web sites that carry it.

The killer has seen the video on half a dozen of those Web sites.

In response to the question about the video, the mayor pounds the lectern with his fist and promises to do whatever it takes to catch the serial killer. He describes the video as “sickening beyond belief.”

At first the mayor seems fairly composed and his comments are nothing more than the banal stuff one would expect from an elected official in his position. But Mayor Ray Guidry’s reputation for making idiotic, off-the-cuff comments is well deserved. He once said that Hurricane Katrina was proof of God’s desire that New Orleans maintain its black majority. He also claimed that recent hurricanes were God’s punishment for the United States’s warmongering.

In talking about the gruesome video of Sandra Jackson’s murder, the mayor starts to wander off script. The killer sets his Sprite on the nightstand and rubs his hands together.

“… and I can promise you this,” the mayor says, looking up from his notes, “we will catch this man, and he will get the death penalty. There’s no question about that. But let me tell you something else I’ve learned in the last few hours. This man, this killer, is not really a man at all. I’ve talked to psychologists and psychiatrists, pediatricians, you name it, and they have told me that this killer is a repressed homosexual… and also probably a pedophile.”

The killer feels his anger swelling inside him.

The mayor pushes on. “What I’m hearing from the experts is that this man is very likely impotent, that he can’t get sexually aroused by women. He’s frustrated by that, and he is taking out his frustrations on his victims. Essentially, he murders attractive women because he can’t get it up.”

The killer clenches his fists and springs off the bed, bumping the nightstand and knocking over his Sprite. He screams at the television. “I’ll get you for this, you son of a bitch. You’ll pay, you’ll pay, you’ll pay.”

From the ceiling above him comes the sound of knocking. Mother is pounding on the floor of her bedroom with her cane. “Shut up down there,” she shrieks.

The killer squeezes his fists so hard his entire body shakes with rage. He keeps squeezing until blood trickles from eight crescent-shaped cuts his fingernails have dug into his palms.

Murphy sat alone in his city-owned jalopy watching a house on Wingate Drive. The captain had reassigned the Taurus to him after bringing him back into Homicide.

The dashboard clock read 10:00 PM. Murphy had been keeping one eye on the house and the other eye on the clock for two hours. A small pile of half-smoked cigarettes lay on the street beneath his window. Before this evening, he hadn’t had a cigarette in more than a year.

How does the killer pick them?

Sandra Jackson’s boyfriend had identified a photo of a butterfly tattoo on the shoulder of the dead woman found on the levee. When Murphy and Gaudet rolled the body, they saw the killer’s signature-“LOG”-carved into her flesh. They also discovered pry marks on the door of the house she shared with the narcotics cop.

But why her? Why Sandra Jackson?

The cop’s house was in Gentilly, a middle-class, multiracial downtown neighborhood. Jackson was thirty-two, a civilian employee at the crime lab. She drove a Pontiac. When she left her husband and two kids, she moved in with the cop she had been seeing on the side. There had been no record of domestic violence with her husband or her boyfriend.

Carol Sue Spencer was thirty-six, close in age to Jackson but different in every other respect. Spencer had been from uptown money. She didn’t work; she played tennis. She drove a BMW. When she separated from her husband, she moved into one of their investment properties.

Why Sandra Jackson? Why Carol Sue Spencer?

At noon, Murphy walked into the clerk of court’s office. Saturday hours were 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM. He pulled everything the clerk had on Jackson and Spencer. It wasn’t much. Spencer had been issued two traffic tickets in the last five years. Jackson had no tickets, probably because she worked for the police department. Both women had been married in New Orleans. Spencer’s marriage lasted thirteen years. Jackson’s lasted five. Both had been divorced within the last year.

A rail-thin deputy clerk in his fifties with a hooked nose and a smoker’s cough checked the secretary of state’s corporations database for Murphy. Neither victim was listed as the owner or an officer of any company. According to the registrar of voters, Spencer was a Republican. Jackson was a Democrat.

Two women separated by income, by neighborhood, by social status, with practically nothing in common, yet both ended up dead at the hands of the same killer. From a homicide investigator’s perspective, there was nothing unusual in that. Murder was often random.

Something that did strike Murphy as unusual, perhaps beyond randomness, was how much the two dead women resembled each other. Looking at their driver’s-license photos, he realized they could have been sisters. Both had dark eyes and dark hair that fell past their shoulders. Spencer was slightly taller than Jackson, but of course, you couldn’t tell that simply by looking at their pictures. Jackson was petite. Spencer, whom Murphy had seen nude during her autopsy, had an athletic build.

When Murphy took a closer look at Carol Sue Spencer’s and Sandra Jackson’s divorce cases, he noticed something else unusual. Both women were listed as the defendants. Their husbands had filed for the divorces. Both had cited adultery as the grounds.

Louisiana was a no-fault state, and Murphy knew that most divorce suits cited the catch-all grounds of “irreconcilable differences.” Few people bothered to claim adultery in their petitions anymore because there was no legal advantage to it. Often, it just complicated the process.

Digging through the divorce records, Murphy could find no other correlation between the two women. They had not used the same divorce attorney. Neither had their husbands. They hadn’t been to the same marriage counselor. There was no connection between the women except that they looked eerily similar and had both been accused of cheating on their husbands.

Murphy skimmed through the computerized records of every divorce case finalized in New Orleans during the past twelve months. Of the more than two hundred cases, in only twenty-eight had the wife been accused of adultery. He pulled all twenty-eight case files.

The files didn’t include photographs, but they did contain basic biographical information. The killer seemed to have recently developed a taste for middle-class white women, so Murphy eliminated black divorcees. He had thirteen files left. Then, on a hunch, he eliminated women younger than twenty-five and older than forty. That left just seven.