Evil Season (10 page)

It is typically more common just to pose bodies in order to shock. One of the most vivid examples of this occurred in Florida with the gruesome murders of the “Gainesville Ripper,” who turned out to be Danny Rolling. During the late summer of 1990, five students from that college town were found murdered and mutilated in their apartments. Most famously, one coed's head was severed and placed on a bookshelf facing the door.

 

 

Mrs. Marcia Corbino, Jon Corbino's widow and author of the crime scene magazine article, had thought that she would be among the first to be interviewed by police, but it wasn't until February 11 that Detective David Grant knocked on her door.

Years later she remembered some of the police officer's questions as “mystifying.” She explained that the article in
Sarasota Magazine
had been an excerpt from her book
A History of Visual Art in Sarasota.
She talked about Ben Stahl, explaining who he was. Corbino told Grant that many of Stahl's paintings had been stolen in the late 1960s from the Museum of the Cross. Stahl died in 1987. She gave the investigator contact information for Stahl's children. His son, she said, still sold his father's paintings every once in a while.

She was also asked by police about another magazine found at the scene, probably
New Magazine,
but not about the one that contained her article.

Mrs. Corbino still didn't know that her magazine article had been referenced by the killer when creating the crime scene. At no time did she get the impression that the policeman who questioned her had any idea who she was.

After she learned of her unique role in the murder case, she wondered if the killer read the magazine that he'd used. Had he made a conscious decision to leave the magazine open to a particular page? If the killer spent some time in the gallery after Wishart was dead, perhaps he had time to do some reading. She felt guilt. She knew it wasn't rational, but she couldn't help it. It was because of that guilt that she decided to write about the murder, a story called “A Mecca for Murder,” which was eventually published in a literary magazine.

“I tried to answer the unanswerable question of why? Why did it happen to her, and why did it happen here? It all seemed out of synch with the universe,” Corbino said.

 

 

For the rest of February and into March, Detectives Grant and Glover received copies from crime analyst Bruce Steinberg of all loitering, prowling, and burglary reports in Sarasota dating back three months before Wishart's murder. They then checked out each one: Where was the guy now? Where was he when Wishart was killed? Since this was a transient crowd, many of these individuals didn't have solid alibis. Police asked them for voluntary DNA samples.

During spring 2004, Detective Sensei DelValle worked on possible leads found in Wishart's address book, handwritten, and on her home and work computers. Nothing.

Jack Carter's investigation carried on throughout the summer of 2004. He used the victim's financial records and personal effects as the basis of his investigation.

It had been months and the investigation into Joyce Wishart's past had yielded little. It was a frightening prospect for an investigator, but it was appearing more and more as if the answer did not lie with the victim. It seemed that this was a randomly selected victim killed by what may be a serial killer at the very start of his career.

 

 

If the rough surgery performed on the victim by the killer was an attempt to remove DNA, the effort was in vain—and the DNA end of the investigation continued full-speed ahead. One suspect who wouldn't give a voluntary DNA samples had to be tricked. DNA material was confiscated from a cigarette butt and the top of a soda can.

Meanwhile, the FDLE's psychological experts carefully considered every known factor of the murder and came up with a general description of the man whom police were looking for. He was white, had a maturity level in the early thirties, was well groomed, was likely to have moved from job to job, lacked sincere relationships in his life, and—though he might be able to mask it in public—held a contempt for society.

 

 

Police were six months into the investigation, and had checked out more than four hundred leads without success, when it happened.

The case broke.

On July 26, 3:30
P.M.
, Detective Glover received a phone call from a very excited analyst at the FDLE Lab. She was Suzanna R. Ulery, and she had great news.

“We've got a match,” she said.

“What's the name?”

“Elton Brutus Murphy.”

This is the story of Elton Brutus Murphy's life. For the most part it's Murphy who's telling it; and from what we can tell, most of it is true. Murphy admits that he wasn't entirely candid at times, but it was nothing personal. He knew that prison officials would be reading this book one day and he didn't want to be “locked up even worse than I am now.” He was very appreciative of the interest in his story and hoped that what he had to say would help contribute to a “dynamic and compelling work of literature.” He wanted you to imagine it was a movie called
Invitation to Murder,
with special effects, maybe animation, and a soundtrack of mind-blowing Pink Floyd records and the anthems of Bon Jovi. Perhaps the director could squeeze into the soundtrack his favorite song of all time, “Beds Are Burning” by Midnight Oil.

Elton Brutus Murphy was born in Wauchula, Florida, on February 3, 1957. He was the son of Elton Murphy Jr. and Betty Jo Murphy. His childhood home was a pastoral scene: a lovely two-large-bedroom cement block single-story house painted a pastel color, nestled under two huge oak trees.

How rustic was it? “Chickens and roosters roamed our yard,” Murphy explained. “We had two monkeys during my youth, and a female goat that my dad milked daily. Dad would drink the goat's milk, but the rest of the family preferred cow's milk. There was a donkey and two horses, one regular and one miniature.”

His dad drank and his parents fought constantly: mostly verbal, some physical. There was some scuffling with the old man before the firstborn son eventually left the house, no injuries or anything like that.

“I only remember one whipping in my life from my father.” It occurred when he was ten or eleven. “Just on the bottom,” Murphy said. “It wasn't like my dad beat me up.”

His dad taught him practical stuff, paid him for the work he did, and made him start a savings account at the bank.

The fights between his parents were what he remembered most. His parents had endurance and could fight all night. Murphy couldn't remember a good night's sleep until he was maybe ten years old.

Predictably, his favorite childhood book was a forget-your-troubles fantasy entitled
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet,
written by Eleanor Cameron. It was about the adventures of two boys named Chuck and David who visited the planet Basidium in their homemade spacecraft.

The family didn't use “Big Elton” and “Little Elton.” They called the boy “Brutus,” after his middle name. Murphy was known as Brutus to most people for most of his life.

When his parents fought, it wasn't just yelling. Stuff was thrown, smashed. One time his mom and dad were arguing and fighting over a .22-caliber pistol and the thing went off.

“I just knew one of them had been shot, but thank God neither of them were,” Murphy said.

According to Murphy, his father was a drunk
and
a coward. Another brouhaha when Brutus was ten resulted in Betty Jo calling the sheriff's department. When the deputies arrived, his dad was hiding beneath the marital bed. As deputies coaxed the father out from under the bed, and then held him at bay, Brutus and his mom packed their stuff and got the hell out.

The separation didn't work out. Brutus and his mom were gone for only a few months when they returned with a promise from Elton that he would go on the wagon. Elton went to Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, and stayed dry for a decade, not hitting the bottle until after he and Betty Jo divorced. Once he started drinking again, his health abruptly went south. He was dead within a year. That was 1980. Elton died when he was forty-three.

“I have no hard feelings toward my parents,” Murphy said years later.

 

 

Elton Brutus Murphy was a bundle of creativity as a kid. He was musical, too. When he was about ten, his parents decided he should take steel guitar lessons. For three full years, he did.

“Mr. Yagle was my teacher,” Murphy remembered. “I got where I was pretty good at it.” His favorite tune to play on guitar was the theme from the TV show
Bonanza.

After three years, however, the steel guitar lessons ended, and so did Murphy's interest. But only temporarily. When he was fifteen, he got back into it, taking Spanish guitar lessons for a year. His teacher was Terry Yagle, Mr. Yagle's son.

 

 

When Brutus was a teenager, and it was normal to argue with parents, he could remember getting into only one verbal altercation with his dad, and he could no longer remember what it was about. He never fought with his mother, ever!

“My parents' problems were with each other, not with me,” he said.

That said, the domestic turmoil was enough to make any boy sulky. Young Brutus sought solace from his troubles by wandering the sixty acres out back that his family owned, fifty acres of orange grove, ten of dense woods. He wasn't into sports, being on a team or anything like that, and preferred roaming the woods alone, both on his family's property and that of others.

That didn't mean he wasn't athletic. He loved to swim, and spent hours gliding across the large pond behind his parents' house. On days when he didn't feel like a swim, he'd grab his fishing pole and fish in that same pond.

“Brim [regional name for bluegill, sometimes spelled bream], catfish, and bass,” Murphy recalled.

For a time, when he was a kid, they had a boat. That was when his dad was still around. And if he wasn't roaming or swimming or fishing, Brutus could even hunt on his own land: deer, squirrel, and rabbit.

As he matured, his walks in the grove changed. He went from fantasizing about war, Indians, and treasure maps, to thinking almost exclusively about, as he put it, “easy girls and women.”

In the movie about his life—the imaginary one playing in Murphy's head—the soundtrack for this part was by the Beatles, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, and Johnny Cash.

“I now consider where I grew up a small paradise,” Murphy has stated.

But paradise didn't last. In 1970, a hard freeze came and destroyed the orange grove. It was never replaced. Most of what had been the grove, forty-five acres of it, was fenced in and the Murphys raised cattle.

The remainder of the cleared land and part of the woods were converted into a nursery in which they grew a wide variety of shrubberies. Murphy had to find someplace else to wander alone—someplace that could never be as magical.

Those acres became a setting for labor rather than relaxation, for he worked in the nursery every day after school until he was sixteen. After that he worked for another nursery and stayed there until he finished school.

 

 

At first, Brutus liked playing Spanish guitar. Better than steel guitar. He enjoyed his lessons. But interest dwindled when he was sixteen and bought an electric guitar.

Before long, Brutus was playing in a small group, all teenaged musicians. He played rhythm, along with Randy. Billy was on drums; Charlie on lead; Karen and Judy sang. Randy, Billy, Karen, and Judy were siblings.

They practiced in a barn about a mile from the Murphy house. “We were so loud that my parents could still hear us!” he said. “We played a couple of dances in Arcadia, at the National Guard Armory.” They played the rock hits of the day: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Deep Purple—“Smoke on the Water” was a crowd favorite—some ZZ Top. They played slow dances, too: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Green, Green Grass of Home.” The band never had a name. They'd talked about giving themselves a name, but they never got around to it.

Throughout the rest of his life, Murphy usually had a guitar. He figured he owned fifteen different guitars over his life. As an older man, long after the high-school dance days, Murphy liked to play the songs of Gordon Lightfoot, whom he saw in concert in 1982. He would perform “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

 

 

Throughout his youth, and really throughout his life, there was one constant for Murphy. He was always in tip-top physical condition. Even when he was having deep problems, he was still buff.

“I always exerted myself in daily exercise,” he said. “I started out as a teen working out with the weights several times a week.” As an adult he always belonged to a gym. He'd lift, run, swim, and relax in the sauna. He also kept exercise equipment at home.

He got himself in such good shape at one point that he was running eight miles a day, six days a week. When that got rough on his joints, he'd ride his bike, sixteen miles a day, and would swim two miles daily.

In jail, of course, there wasn't much to do other than exercise, and it was while behind bars that Elton Brutus Murphy ended up setting his personal records.

He boasted: “I was in the Leon County Jail, and in one day I did eighteen hundred push-ups. Not at one time—in sets of twenty throughout the day!”