“Your car down in the parking garage?” Thorne asked me.
“Yes.” I picked up the catalog. “What do you mean ‘police tape’?”
“Let’s go. I’ll walk with you. I want you two to look into this.”
Okay, so either our second briefing of the day had been postponed or Thorne was giving us permission to miss it. In either case that was fine by me. I’d rather be out in the field any day investigating something than sitting in a meeting talking about it.
The three of us maneuvered past the desks and made our way to the hall that led to the elevators. I was flipping through the catalog. “What do we have?”
“A guy who sells souvenirs. Thompson managed to locate the most recent issue. He came across it while cross-checking tips from Illinois.”
We filed into the elevator and he punched the button for the lower-level parking garage. “The guy who puts out this catalog has all his orders sent to a PO box, but we tracked down his name: Timothy Griffin. He lives in Fort Atkinson. Check out the back.”
On the catalog’s back cover, just below the return address, was a sticker advertising that a fifty-foot-long length of police tape was for sale:
“Just in! Maneater of The Midwest Police Tape!
Soon to be A Collector’s Item!! $350!”
It listed the date and location of the crime. The tape was purportedly from the Illinois homicide in which the woman’s lungs had been removed and evidently consumed.
“Unbelievable,” Ralph muttered.
As the elevator descended, I studied the catalog carefully.
The items were cross-referenced so you could search by killer, type of crime (pedophilia, homicide), postmortem activity (vampirism, cannibalism, rape), state, years, or price.
There were decks of trading cards of fifty-two of the most famous criminals in U.S. history, Christmas letters Dahmer had written to his mother, Gacy’s clown makeup, Manson’s Bible with his name scribbled on the inside front cover. Knickknacks, drill bits, pliers, saws, memorabilia, clothes and more. Hundreds of items. Even, supposedly, the original 1934 Albert Fish letter to Grace Budd’s parents. It was one of the most infamous and disturbing writings of any sexual predator or serial killer of the last hundred years and the guy who’d sent out this catalog, Timothy Griffin, claimed to have the original copy.
Just thinking about the letter made my stomach turn.
Fish, who was put to death in New York back in 1936, was perhaps the most depraved sadomasochistic pedophile and cannibal ever captured in the U.S. The authorities never found out how many people he killed, but he claimed to “have had children in every state.” Whether that meant molesting them or killing them was never established, but from what I’d read about the case, it wouldn’t have surprised me if it were both. In 1928 he abducted a ten-year-old girl named Grace Budd, murdered her, cooked her, and then ate her. Six years later he wrote a letter to her parents about how much he’d enjoyed it.
That was the letter advertised in Griffin’s catalog.
Sickening.
We reached the parking garage level. Exited the elevator.
“How would you ever verify that the stuff’s legit?” Ralph, who’d been looking at the pages with me, asked Thorne. “I mean the signed letters, okay, I get that. Those might be available from relatives. But Gacy’s clown makeup? Couldn’t you buy makeup like that at dozens of stores here in Wisconsin alone? Just claim it was Gacy’s?”
Gacy.
A man responsible for one of the biggest body counts of any serial killer in U.S. history.
Remembering what all these guys had done was somewhat overwhelming. It was hard not to find myself just getting numb to it all.
Gacy, of course, was the civic leader in the Chicago area who was convicted of killing thirty-three young men back in the 1970s. He dressed up as a clown and volunteered on weekends cheering up children in local hospitals. Three times he was named the local Jaycees chapter’s Man of the Year and had been personally congratulated for his public service and contributions to the causes of the Democratic party by First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The police found a photo of her standing beside him when they were removing more than two dozen corpses buried in the crawl space beneath his house.
He claimed he’d been set up for the crimes.
Thorne shrugged. “You got me, but look at the price tags-people are shelling out big bucks for that garbage. Somebody believes it’s authentic.”
“And he knows about the lungs,” I said. “Griffin does, that they were eaten. He calls the guy a ‘maneater,’ not just a killer. That information hasn’t been released to the press.”
Thorne nodded thoughtfully. “True.”
Ralph let out a few choice words about what he thought of Griffin and his little business enterprise. Even though I was used to the rough language of cops, Ralph managed to phrase things in ways I’d never even heard before, but I found myself agreeing with the sentiment of everything he said.
I was glad to follow up on this, but Fort Atkinson was an hour away. I asked Thorne, “If Griffin lives in Fort Atkinson, will that be a jurisdictional problem?”
He deferred to Ralph who gave a knowing half grin. “That’s one of the advantages of having me here, bro. If Griffin’s selling crime scene tape from a homicide in Illinois, we have an interstate connection. And that means it’s under my jurisdiction.”
He might have been stretching things a bit, but it worked for me.
In the garage we found out that Radar had taken our cruiser, but Thorne signed off for Ralph and me to use an undercover sedan that was typically used on drug busts. Ralph asked him, “Has this guy Griffin ever surfaced before? Any priors?”
“No. Thompson checked his record right off the bat. Apparently, he’s a celebrity in his own right in certain circles, though. An author named Heather Isle-she writes those true crime books-anyway, she uses him as one of her ‘expert’ sources.” Thorne turned to me. “You know her, right? The true crime writer?”
“No, Saundra Weathers. A novelist. Writes mysteries. She lived in my hometown, back when we were kids.”
“It was…” I could see him struggling to find the right words. “The Weathers’ tree house, right? Where you found-”
“Not theirs, exactly. No. But it was next to their property.”
Thorne knew this was a touchy subject for me and he let it go at that. “Well, go have a talk with Griffin. See what he can tell us about the police tape and how he knows it was from the scene of a ‘maneater.’”
We briefly discussed the observations Ralph and I had come up with while we were at the restaurant and at my desk a few minutes ago. Thorne promised to assign the projects to the task force and contact us if they came up with anything, then he left, and Ralph and I climbed into the UC car. I called in to check Griffin’s DMV records and got his address.
“So I’m curious,” Ralph said when I got off the radio. “What did you find in the tree house?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
Plainfield, Wisconsin
Joshua caught hold of Adele Westin as she swayed, then supported her as she lost consciousness and drifted into his arms.
He lowered her gently to the kitchen’s linoleum floor.
The drugs he’d used on her were powerful and she didn’t wake up, not even when he brought out the pruning shears to get the item he’d decided to leave behind for her fiance to show him how serious he was about his demands.
He left the note detailing what needed to happen before five o’clock, and after placing the proof in the refrigerator that he had Adele, Joshua carried her to the Ford Taurus and laid her in the trunk.
Then left for Milwaukee.
For the train yards.
Being mid-November in Wisconsin, it was starting to get dark early. Based on the drive time, he figured he’d be able to get started on her right when he needed to, just before the gloaming.