Evil Season (20 page)

On January 23, 2004, one week after the murder, Murphy filled out an application for a haircutting job at the Great Clips Salon in Bradenton. He was hired two days later. The manager of the salon was Monique Santiago (pseudonym), and it was owned by Joanne Terefinko.

His coworker Cindy Keenan (pseudonym) at Great Clips said that she remembered thinking Murphy was a nice guy at first. But then he started speaking of the “spiritual arts” and Keenan decided to give Murphy some space.

She didn't remember the specifics of his beliefs, but she got the impression that Murphy thought he could “see the future.” He'd only worked at Great Clips for a couple of weeks, and she never saw him outside the salon.

For the most part he was okay with the customers, engaging them in normal conversations about the weather, their careers, whatever. Only once in a while did he bring up his odd beliefs—people who live in the walls and stuff like that.

When his manager told him to knock off the alien talk, Murphy lost his temper and “got in her face.” After that happened, Murphy gave off “a very bad vibe.”

Murphy sometimes discussed his artistic pursuits; a couple of times, if someone expressed interest, he showed some of his art to the customers. As far as she knew, he never tried to sell any art. He did give some away, though.

Keenan said the artist gave off bad vibes, but the art did not. Murphy's artwork was
happy
—colorful, maybe watercolors, “splashes of stuff,” with lots of bright blues and greens, maybe some yellow.

“Happy” was not the first word that sprang into Murphy's mind when asked about his art at that time. “The artwork I showed to clients at Great Clips was supernatural in origin,” he explained—multidimensional supernatural, at that. “These were pictures of spirits
created by spirits,
” he explained.

From his viewpoint it could hardly have been any other way. He was
so
involved in the spiritual world. The spiritual world was much more Murphy's world than the real world was. He'd crossed over.

The spiritual world, like a good lover, could be either dominant or submissive. Luckily for him, every time he summoned up a spirit to create a piece of art, the spirits accommodated him. He never knew what to expect. The results were eclectic—and, yes, some of the results looked happy, he admitted.

“Even whimsical,” Murphy added.

The incident that made Keenan feel most uncomfortable was when Murphy grabbed her hand and wouldn't let go.

“I really had to back off,” she recalled. “He was a strong guy and I made a mental note to never be caught alone with him.”

Murphy started hypnotizing the customers again so he could feel them up and no one would care. Predictably, the end for Murphy at Great Clips came when a client accused him of inappropriate touching. The incident occurred on Saturday, January 31.

Murphy left and never again saw the people at Great Clips. He stayed in his apartment on Shade Avenue until February 16. His behavior at his last haircutting job was so bad that cops were called and advised Murphy to hit the road, and soon.

So he disassembled his bike, boxed it up, and carried it out the door. His next stop: the Sarasota bus terminal—less than a mile west, northwest from the murder scene. Under an assumed name he purchased a Greyhound bus ticket to Jacksonville.

He stayed in a nice two-story motel in Jacksonville for a few days. Although he didn't dwell on it, part of him understood he was no longer just “moving on.” He was no longer freedom personified. He was no longer an aimless, wandering sort of fellow.

He was
fleeing.
He'd done something bad and it wasn't a good idea to stay in one place for very long.

Although the hotel was extremely comfortable, he didn't stay in his room much. After reassembling his bike, he pedaled around Jacksonville for hours, looking for stuff to steal.

His days were so filled with healthy outdoor activity that he slept like a log at night. And he was falling asleep by early evening, experiencing a “good kind of tired.”

He tried to stay focused. He was no longer under the delusion that he was gathering materials for his art, or cleaning up because his life was a never-ending battle against litter. He knew he was stealing for profit, and he tried to keep his mind from wandering.

The occurrences in the Provenance Gallery crossed his mind occasionally, as one might expect. That was all. He was untroubled by feelings of guilt. He felt that his paranoia, his mental illness in general, was much milder than it had been a year earlier.

He wasn't looking for communications centers and surveillance teams as much as he was looking for fancy houses with no one home to break into.

There was one aspect of his time in Joyce Wishart's art gallery that was sticking in his craw— the camera, his lone remaining souvenir from the Provenance. It bothered him. He couldn't use it, because he needed a computer to get the pictures. It had value, but he couldn't hock it. There was a chance it could be traced back to Joyce Wishart.

When he'd had his fill of Jacksonville, Murphy rode on his bike forty miles to the southeast to St. Augustine. On the way he disposed of the camera—he threw it into a lake. Now all of his murder souvenirs were gone. He only had his memories.

Murphy pedaled into the beach town around midnight or one in the morning. It took him an annoyingly long time to find a place to stay. When he finally did locate a room to check into, it was in a hole-in-the-wall hotel, not nearly as nice as the place in Jacksonville.

Not that he was difficult to please. “It was still comfortable,” Murphy said of the accommodations. He was so tired from his bike ride that he was asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

In the morning he engaged in some early criminal activities. He liked to think of himself as a one-man crime wave. Ever since he left Sarasota, there had been crime after crime. He was a breaking-and-entering machine.

And it wasn't just burglaries, either. There were a couple of purse snatches, too. One woman's wallet had $400 in it. Another had $300. One burglary netted him $450 in cash. He was traveling around Florida, leaving a trail of broken windows and pried-open doors.

Back at the hole-in-the-wall, he again disassembled his bike, but this time he took the parts outside, a few at a time, and threw them in a Dumpster.

That afternoon he took a Greyhound to Tallahassee under a different alias. He stayed in Tallahassee for only a few hours before taking another bus to Mobile, Alabama. He spent the night in a motel; the next day he caught the bus to Houston, Texas.

The bus stopped for a leg-stretching break at the New Orleans terminal, which was huge, with many, many busses parked side by side. The most busses he'd ever seen in one place. Plus, a lot of hustle and bustle.

It was past ten at night when the bus pulled into the Houston terminal. The Houston bus station was not nearly as busy as the one in New Orleans. Still, there was a moderate level of activity—it wasn't deserted or anything like that. Plus, the Houston terminal was a well-lit location. Murphy liked that.

Murphy set off into the city, “looking for a motel”—walking straight or making turns, without rhyme or reason—but he never made it.

Murphy didn't know why, but he had always been attracted to homes that were converted into businesses. It was that very attraction that—on the evening of February 25, 2004—led Murphy to break into Midtown Dentistry on Westheimer Road in Houston.

It wasn't just any dentist's office, either. It was the office of Dr. Jonathan Penchas, a so-called “superdentist,” with an expertise in maxillofacial prosthodontics. The building was a two-story framed structure, with yellow lap siding.

“I entered by smashing out a rear window with my hatchet,” Murphy said. “The alarm went off immediately.” He climbed through the window, found the alarm panel, and turned off the alarm. He found and pocketed $60 in a desk drawer—his final act as a free man—and was standing in the reception area when he knew the jig was up. Flashing lights, screeching brakes. When he looked out the front window, he saw a policeman approaching the building, with his gun drawn. Then there were two more. Murphy threw his hands up in the air.

 

 

Murphy was caught red-handed. The first responder to the alarm was Officer Shawna Hampton, who found the dentist's front door locked. However, there was a broken window on the building's south side. Officer Hampton saw a light go on upstairs just before fellow officers arrived on the scene. Houston police officers J. J. Garcia, a field training officer, and Jaclyn “Jackie” Clark, a probationary officer in field training, made the bust. When arrested, Murphy still had the hatchet. He also had on his person a jackknife and three different prescription narcotics (fifty-three Valium pills, seven Tylenol with codeine, and forty-nine Darvon).

He did not resist.

Murphy was plenty mad at being caught—but there was evidence that he was an angry man before that, too.

One cop observed, “The suspect was found inside the business, which was ransacked with property destroyed.”

The alarm panel was destroyed, apparently smashed with some sort of object. The dentist had a small living space above his office. The burglar had gone up there as well, opened the refrigerator, and helped himself to a couple of cans of beer.

When Dr. Penchas arrived at his office, Murphy had already been apprehended, his hands still up in the air. The dentist had never seen the man before. The burglar was dressed all in black and was wearing a headlamp on his head. Dr. Penchas recalled thinking that this guy was like a “Hollywood burglar,” straight out of central casting.

 

 

There's something to be said for “Texas justice.” It's quick. In a month Murphy was assigned a public defender, quickly tried, convicted, and was sentenced to a year in jail.

Pow!

He was sent to the Pam Lychner State Jail, forty-five minutes outside Houston, which was for prisoners who were serving terms less than two years.

“Even though they still called it ‘jail,' it was really prison,” Murphy observed.

And it was hot—the hottest cell he'd ever been in. “Luckily, they gave me lots of paper and pens and colored pencils so I could be creative. I dripped sweat onto the many drawings I drew,” he said.

Just as before, the drawings were all spiritual in nature, “loaded with spirits.”

He was in that Texas jail for at least two and a half months. His job while there was cutting the other inmates' hair, which one might think would be Murphy's dream job.

“I hated cutting inmates' hair,” Murphy said, still angered by the memories. “They always wanted haircuts I wasn't allowed to give.”

It was always something. They wanted it longer on top than he was allowed to do, or they wanted shorter on the sides than the rules allowed. No one was happy.

He requested a transfer, which was granted, and joined a small group of inmates that cleaned up the outside visitation area. He also was allowed to step outside the jail's fence momentarily when he took out the trash.

Then he got in trouble. Murphy didn't want to talk about what he did, but it was bad enough to land him three months of solitary confinement in the summer, miserably hot, soaked with sweat all day and night.

 

 

During his incarceration Murphy gave authorities a sample of his DNA.

While in jail he wrote letters to his brother and sister-in-law. The letters contained now familiar bragging. He said he had a calling, that he was strong and “getting stronger by the minute.” He said that he was drawing and coloring pictures and sending them to his kids. His fellow inmates were “amazed” and respected him because of his artistic brilliance.

The letters were filled with racial hatred, as Murphy reacted to the fact that his new jail home was not segregated. Murphy wrote that he didn't need for them to send him any money. He had plenty of money on him when he was arrested, more than enough to last him the year he'd be in jail. He wrote that he knew he seemed crazy sometimes, but they had to trust his instincts.

The DNA match between the Murphy sample in Texas and the one left at the scene of Wishart's murder took longer than it should have because of a glitch in the FDLE database.

Suzanna Ulery had just told Detective Jim Glover that a match had been found for the DNA that was foreign to the victim's found at the Joyce Wishart crime scene. The DNA sample that matched, Ulery said, had come from the State of Florida's Convicted Offender DNA Database. Ulery said, “Elton Brutus Murphy's DNA was obtained as a result of his burglary conviction in Leon County.”

The matching samples were those taken from skin found on the alcove carpet under the body, blood found on a copy of
New Magazine,
and blood found inside the victim's right shoe.

The name rang no bell. It hadn't come up once during the Sarasota Police Department's exhaustive investigation.
Thank God for science,
Glover thought,
or this bastard would have gotten away with it.

Murphy was not going to be difficult to locate. He was housed at that moment in the Pam Lychner State Jail in Humble, Texas, where he was serving a one-year term for burglary. Murphy had been in that jail since February 26, 2004, about five and a half weeks after the Sarasota murder. He was tall, with brown hair and green eyes. When free, he cut a well-groomed appearance, wearing Dockers most of the time and neatly pressed shirts.

Captain Tom Laracey and Sergeant Norman Reilly were informed of the match. Laracey called a meeting for the following day in the CID's conference room. Also at that briefing were Detective David Grant and Bruce Steinberg, a criminal analyst.

Detective Glover contacted Lieutenant Danny Billingsley at the Harris County Sheriff's Office (HCSO) in Texas and made arrangements for a couple of Sarasota investigators to go there and interview Murphy. They would need a Texas bench warrant. The interview could not take place at the state jail, so the prisoner would need to be transported to the county jail facility. That would take some time; but, in the meantime, the Sarasota investigators could go to Houston and examine the items that were found on Murphy's person at the time of his Texas arrest.

This was done on July 28, 2004. His items held in the Houston Police Department (HPD) evidence room included a backpack, a fanny pack, a hatchet, two cordless drills, red gloves, clothes, tin snips, and a set of keys with a dog tag (with the name
Edward A. Dupuis
), two books, and a folding knife in a leather pouch. Inside the backpack Detective Grant found batteries wrapped in a black sock, an apparent improvised blackjack.

Waiting for the Texas bench warrant and the transfer of the prisoner also gave the SPD an opportunity to talk to some of the people who knew Murphy the best, to get an idea what he was all about before plotting their interrogation.

 

 

Florida law enforcement started with Murphy's first wife, Elaine Crabtree, who had changed her name to Margaret Towne. She told Detective Philip DeNiro that during their three years of marriage, Murphy had frequently discussed his dream to become a minister.

“He had at least two bisexual relationships before we were married,” the woman said. It turned out that this meant he'd been a third bedmate for swinging couples.

She was twenty-two, and was named Elaine Crabtree, when she married Brutus. He was twenty. They lived in Pensacola and Bermuda on a naval base, and they spoke in tongues.

“He wanted very much to be a preacher, and I wanted very much to be a preacher's wife,” she said. He had been very religious when they first met. They broke up because he fooled around with other women. He picked them up in bars.

Asked about Murphy's dad, Towne said she knew he was abusive and died drunk. “When they found him, he was surrounded by, like, thirty empty bottles,” she said. He hadn't just died drunk; he drank himself to death. The mom remarried.

What did she know about his other women? Not much. She assumed that he'd gotten married a few years after they split up, because she'd received an annulment form from the Catholic Church, which she signed.

“Any abuses during the marriage?” Detective DeNiro inquired.

“He became abusive and tried to kill me about three times,” she said. One time he put a towel around her neck and tried to choke her. “He was in some kind of trance and I had to slap him out of it.”

Another time, in Bermuda, they were riding on a motorcycle and he became very angry with her. He began pounding on her head. “If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, I probably would have died!” she exclaimed.

The third attempt came when they were renting canoes, not far from where his mom lived. He took the paddle from the canoe and struck her over the head with it. They were divorced soon after that, and she hadn't seen him in years.

The police wanted to know more about Murphy's mother. Anyone who had witnessed the Provenance crime scene had to conclude that Murphy had oedipal issues. The woman said Murphy's mother was a hard woman; she had no choice but to be hard because of the man she married. She'd died just a few years back, following a fall in her home.

She concluded the interview by saying that Murphy had had many affairs with other women during their marriage, and that he enjoyed being in the woods.

 

 

On July 30, 2004, Detectives Mike Jackson and Anthony DeFrancisco interviewed Dave Gallant, the man Murphy met in a bookstore and went on to share alternative beliefs with. Gallant told them he met Murphy around Christmas, 2002, in the Barnes & Noble in the Brandon Town Center. The fast friends had gone for coffee together. Gallant ended up giving Murphy his phone number. After that, Murphy called every once in a while at night and they would chat about religion. Murphy came over to his place a few times and told Gallant he was a hairdresser for women. He said he got into an argument at the salon, lost his job, and was about to lose his apartment. Gallant invited him to move in with him, and Murphy did—for three or four months, starting April or May 2003.

On July 22, 2003, Murphy borrowed Gallant's car with permission and totaled it. Murphy suffered a broken collarbone in the accident and was “laid up for a while.” After the accident Murphy stayed in his room a lot. He and Gallant didn't talk much. Murphy still went to work, however.

“He was a big, strong man, and he was powering through the pain,” Gallant commented.

It wasn't that he got mad because the guy totaled his car, but they didn't chat quite as much after the accident. Murphy borrowed the car because his red Geo was broken, and Gallant loaned him $500 to have it fixed. He never saw that money again.

Then came a time that summer—August, maybe—when Gallant spent the weekend with his girlfriend. When he returned on Sunday, Murphy and his belongings were gone. No note, nothing.

Murphy left some stuff behind, in a storage shed in the back: two pairs of shoes, several computers, a hot plate, and a roll of metal, which he had picked up somewhere to make a sculpture with. Murphy himself had put that stuff in the shed when he moved in. There was a combination lock on the shed, and Murphy knew the combination. It was not uncommon for him to go out to the shed. Gallant had no idea what he did back there. Gallant said he didn't know where Murphy lived before he became his roommate. At one time he knew where Murphy worked, but he'd forgotten. He had Murphy's business card at one point, but he was pretty sure he'd thrown it away.

Gallant saw Murphy once after that. It was winter and Murphy showed up, unannounced, and stayed for maybe an hour. It was cold out and Murphy wasn't dressed for it, just a T-shirt and pants. He was carrying a gym bag, which he put on top of Gallant's freezer during the visit. They talked religion, and Gallant passed on some “new information” he'd learned. Gallant was under the impression that Murphy had just gotten fired from a job. Gallant assumed that Murphy would spend the night, maybe move back in with him, but Murphy left without saying where he was headed. Gallant looked out the window and saw Murphy leaving in a car, and that was the last he ever saw of him. Gallant noticed no injuries. Murphy seemed fine—relaxed, casual. He was usually kind of a stressed-out guy, but not on that last visit. It was strange.

When asked if anything was missing after Murphy took off that one weekend, Gallant thought and said yes, the license plate from the totaled car. He'd had it on a table out in the shed after the accident and then it was gone. He assumed that Murphy took it. It had to be him. No one else knew the combination for the lock. It was odd. Gallant had thousands of dollars' worth of tools back there and Murphy just took a license plate. That was all he knew about Murphy. Gallant concluded by saying he was done with Florida. Gallant's plans were to sell his house and head west, maybe to New Mexico.

 

 

Detectives Glover and Grant interviewed Albert Sanchez, the super of the transient rooming house on Shade Avenue in Sarasota, where Murphy had been living at the time of the murder.

Sanchez said he remembered four things about Murphy: He drove a Geo Metro for a time. He rode a bike after that. He was a good cook, always cooking stew. He wore a backpack sometimes.

Any recollection of when Murphy cooked stew? No.

The detectives were struck by two facts that just might fit together: First, Murphy stole his victim's vagina from the murder scene. Second, Murphy cooked stew.

What Sanchez didn't know wouldn't hurt him, they guessed—and they couldn't help but wonder if Murphy's stew contained a secret ingredient.

 

 

Murphy's second ex-wife, Paula, spoke to Detectives DeNiro and Carmen Woods about her ex-husband. Paula provided the investigation with useful dates. They were married in 1987, divorced 1996. They lived in Tallahassee, where they ran a haircutting place together. They had two kids, who were ages fifteen and eleven in 2004. She was Catholic, and Murphy had been adamant that he did not want the kids raised as Catholics. She told police that Murphy had a short temper—he yelled at her and the kids too much—but he had never been violent with her. She remembered him as a bit of a hoarder, collecting magazines and newspapers. She didn't recall him being artistic when they were together. (Amazingly, it seems, Murphy kept his artistic feelings internal. His gathering of art materials translated to Paula as hoarding, his “gallery” in their haircutting shop was, to her, storage.)

Regarding his religion, Paula said, “He kind of didn't believe in God, but he was looking into several different religions before we got together.”

She told police about the time she had sex with another man while Murphy watched. “I wasn't thrilled about it, but I did it,” she said. Murphy, she added, was merely a spectator at this event and was in no way a participant.

After the divorce, she said, Murphy went to Tampa and moved in with his mother, Betty Jo. He was distraught over the breakup and began to act out. He paid child support until 2002. He took each child for two weeks every summer. He called every Sunday. Then it all stopped. That was the same year he went to jail, and also when his peculiar behavior worsened.

In the recent past—sometime in January 2004—Murphy showed up at Paula's house to see the kids. This troubled her, because it was the first time he'd ever just shown up without calling first. He arrived right at dinnertime, driving his little red Geo. He brought a used computer, which he gave to Trevor. The car appeared to be in good condition, and it didn't look filled up with stuff.

He stayed for three or four hours—had dinner, spent time with both children—and as he left, he told Paula that he “had to get back to Tampa.” He drove off in the tiny red car.

Other than its unexpected nature, Paula could recall nothing unusual about the visit.

“Wait, there was one thing,” she said. “He had bruises on his arms,” she said.

They tried to pin down the actual date of that visit. She knew it had to be before January 19, because that was her son's birthday and Murphy came before that. It was the week before, in fact, and it was a weekday. She finally concluded that he showed up unexpectedly between January 6 and January 10.

“How did he have money for a car?” Detective DeNiro asked.

“As far as I knew, he was cutting hair. As far as I knew, he was still working for his brother at the Solomon's Castle restaurant,” she said.

“Was there any conversation about his mental state?”

“I asked him if he was taking his meds. He said he didn't need them anymore.” She'd talked to a doctor about him once and was told he was bipolar. She knew he was supposed to be on meds, because she took him to the drugstore once to pick them up.

But the big reason she knew something was wrong with his mental state was that she could see his behavior. It had changed. He'd grown yet flakier.

When they were together, he might say a wacky thing every once in a while, but it was just a facet of his quirky personality. By 2004, he was acting wacky all the time, discussing aliens every other sentence.

Back in 2002, after his arrest for criminal mischief at the apartment complex, Paula cleaned out his apartment. There was evidence of madness there as well.

“You said he was a bit of a hoarder. Was it cluttered ?”

“It was more than just clutter,” she said. “There were maybe a thousand wire hangers. He was collecting hangers.”

She mentioned that she'd heard that, in more recent days, he'd been eating out of Dumpsters.

While Murphy was in jail, Paula had occasion to speak with his brother Dean's wife, who said that Murphy's breakdown was all Paula's fault. She said that his troubles started when Paula left him and broke his heart.

“Back in the day, you two ever go camping?” DeNiro inquired.