Evil Season (9 page)

Silberstein herself was interviewed and also remembered the occasion. Instead of focusing on the poor turnout, Silberstein focused on a helper Wishart had around. It was a man named Jim, who carried paintings from one place to another and things like that. Jim gave Silberstein the creeps. She didn't know why, but she thought it was something the police should know.

Silberstein knew something was wrong over the weekend. Wishart's gallery was either open or the CLOSED sign was up. But that weekend she wasn't there, and yet the sign was not up. She said of Wishart's four kids, Joyce only spoke to two; the others hadn't even called her when she was sick. Her ex-husband had been abusive and once injured her foot so severely that she required several surgeries.

Sergeant DeNiro talked to Gloria Owens, who was also familiar with Jim. “I felt uncomfortable around him, too,” Owens said. “He was very strange. I can't put my finger on it. I just had the feeling that he wasn't right.”

Jim turned out to be Jim Arthur (pseudonym), a retired airlines employee originally from Illinois, who had been the weekend box office manager at the Asolo Theatre when Wishart worked there. Arthur had had a key to the Provenance for a time when Wishart was ill, but he returned it a long time ago.

A woman named Andrea Briggs told police that she'd found a homemade doll just down the street from the Provenance, and she didn't know if there was voodoo going on or what, but she thought it might be important. The doll, police noted, had no face and wore an acorn for a hat. It was spooky.

A private detective called SPD to report a hunch that had him troubled. He knew of a ne'er-do-well with the first name of Cloud, who had a history of taking things that didn't belong to him and forging checks. Cloud claimed to be a Native American. The interesting thing, though, was that he was a regular at art shows, where he tried to sell knives he had made, with blades ranging from one to ten inches in length. “Some of them were very odd-looking,” the private eye reported. “They looked more like scalpels to me.”

Some 911 callers didn't even have a concrete occurrence or sighting to report. “I just have a funny feeling I'm being followed,” one woman complained to the emergency dispatcher. “Especially when I'm downtown,” she added.

Sometimes the caller interested cops more than the complaint. A man called to say he “knew something” about the murder. A background check on the caller revealed that he had an arrest record for false imprisonment and selling porn to kids. He just wanted to get “inside” the investigation because he'd heard there was kinkiness involved.

The community's fear and shock were compounded when, only two weeks after Wishart's murder, an eleven-year-old local girl, Carlie Brucia, was abducted and murdered in Sarasota.

Carlie was walking home from a friend's house in broad daylight on February 1, 2004, and was abducted by a man in a car. She was raped and strangled to death. Her body was dumped in the woods on the grounds of the Central Church of Christ, hidden with tree branches, two and a half miles from the site of her abduction.

The body was not discovered for four days; by the time of its discovery, it was partially decomposed and eaten by insects and animals. Dr. Vega, who performed Joyce Wishart's autopsy, was also the medical examiner for the Carlie Brucia case.

The case broke when it was discovered that Carlie's abduction was caught on video by a camera mounted on the rear of Evie's Car Wash, on Bee Ridge Road, in southwest Sarasota, exactly five miles southeast of the Provenance Gallery.

The abductor's family members identified him, and police arrested Joseph P. Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old auto mechanic. Wishing and praying, police looked at Smith as the possible killer of Joyce Wishart. There was disappointment when they found he wasn't the guy. They also investigated Smith as a possible perp for the abduction of twelve-year-old Jennifer Renee Odom, who disappeared in Pasco County in 1993. Again, no connection.

Smith was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. No prior connection between abductor and victim was found. Carlie was apparently a random victim.

At the time of Carlie's murder, reporters sought to create sensational headlines, and so used details from Dr. Vega's autopsy report to draw parallels between this crime and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.

Those similarities included the fact that both victims were strangled with thin string ligatures. Circumferential abrasions on the necks of both victims were horizontal, with just a slight upward deviation on the back.

Both victims had had their hands bound together. Both had bruises and abrasions in addition to ligature marks. No semen was found on the body in either case. In both instances a tiny spot containing male DNA was found on their clothing.

Dr. Vega noted that the ligature had been applied from the back, due to the slight upward slant in the back. Great strength would not have been necessary to complete the murder, as only about eleven pounds of pulling pressure on the ligature would have been necessary. Dr. Vega said the victim was killed by the ligature's compression of the carotid arteries on each side of the neck.

The prosecution got its conviction when the spot of DNA material on Carlie's shirt turned out to be Smith's semen, and fibers found on Carlie's shirt matched those found in the station wagon Smith had borrowed on the night following Carlie's abduction. Strands of Carlie's hair were also found in the car.

Although the ligature used to strangle Carlie was never found, Dr. Vega felt strongly that a shoelace had been used.

Testifying at the trial, Smith's brother said that Smith had confessed to him to having “rough sex” with the victim.

According to the coroner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Cyril Wecht, pedophiles have been known to use “erotic strangulation” during the abuse of little girls, as it causes mild convulsions and seizures that, to the pedophile, resemble sexual climax.

The dark clouds over Sarasota hovered for months. It wasn't until the summer approached and the weather got very hot that some of the sadness left.

“Hotter'n hell,” folks kvetched—this small talk seemed so normal compared to the thoughts they'd been forced to think for the past few months.

 

 

By the time of Carlie Brucia's murder, DNA experiments were already being conducted on blood foreign to the victim found at the Joyce Wishart crime scene—and though no match for the DNA had yet been found, there were a few conclusions that could be drawn.

After a profile of the foreign blood was created by the FDLE DNA scientists, that profile was sent by SPD detective Glover to DNAPrint Genomics on Cocoanut Avenue in Sarasota for a bio-geographical ancestry analysis. The corporation doing the analysis had developed proprietary technologies for efficiently targeting “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” which predict a subject's gene pool. This analysis concluded that there was a 96 percent chance that the killer was of European descent. He was a white guy.

One of the white men police talked to was Peter Hooten, who said he'd known Joyce Wishart for about a year. He went into her gallery once a month. He characterized her as a woman constantly on the Internet, trying to learn as much as she could about art. He was an art collector and had purchased one painting from Wishart. He'd been out of town, in Claremont, on the night of the murder. When Detective DeFrancisco asked Hooten if they could collect a DNA sample, he said he'd prefer discussing the matter with his lawyer first. DeFrancisco subsequently received a letter from Thomas D. Shults, of the Kirk-Pinkerton law firm, saying that Hooten would not be supplying a DNA sample for “privacy reasons.”

Another white guy whom police interviewed was Robert Lyman Ardren, who made it onto the suspect list because he was a contributing writer for
Sarasota Magazine,
the periodical that had been found near Joyce Wishart's body. Robert “Bob” Ardren worked as the director of public affairs for the Ringling Museum of Art, and he was curator for a time for the Ringling Circus Museum. He told Detective DeFrancisco that he worked full-time for the Pelican Press, and part-time for
Sarasota Magazine
and the
Herald-Tribune
. He hadn't seen anything odd. He believed if there had been something odd, he would have seen it, since he was constantly hanging out in downtown Sarasota, in particular at that “new coffee shop where Charlie's News used to be.”

How well did he know Wishart?

As far as he could recall, he'd never had much conversation with the dead woman. Just hello and good-bye.

“I haven't spoken to her in a while, maybe a couple of months,” Ardren said. “Is it true what they are saying?”

“Is what true?” DeFrancisco asked.

“Is it true that she was . . . sexually mutilated?”

“I can't talk about the crime scene,” the detective replied.

Ardren took that as yes. In his humble opinion, he told DeFrancisco, that this was no crime of passion. Maybe it was supposed to look like a crime of passion, but no.

“I believe this was the work of the Colombian Mafia,” Ardren said.

DeFrancisco asked Ardren for a DNA sample. Ardren said no problem.

Mark Ormond, a local art consultant who wrote a column for the magazine, was also asked for a DNA sample.

Jimmy Dean, the executive publisher of
Sarasota Magazine,
was interviewed twice by investigators.

Bottom line: If you were a white guy and knew the victim—even slightly—chances were good the Sarasota police asked for a DNA sample. Even non-acquaintances were asked for samples if they had been known to “hang out downtown.” Investigators had high hopes for one guy who was known to loiter downtown and “say inappropriate things to women.” But his DNA, like all of the rest, didn't match that found in the gallery.

 

 

During the afternoon of February 2, Detective Glover interviewed Kevin Elias (pseudonym), who had worked for two and a half years at the parking garage across the street from the murder. He said he saw nothing out of the ordinary on January 16, but there were elements of his bio that intrigued the investigator. Elias told Glover he'd grown up in a military family that frequently moved from place to place, and once had been arrested for burglary. He didn't know the victim. Didn't even know what she looked like. Glover asked Elias what he thought had happened. Elias said he only knew what he'd heard: how the victim had been stuffed into the exhaust vent, how she'd been mutilated, cut to pieces, and then reassembled. Glover asked what type of individual might do such a thing, and Elias said some strange things: “I feel a little guilt for what I did,” he said at one point. “I hope I'm not involved,” he said. The killer, he believed, might have been “a veteran.”

Detective Carmen Woods interviewed a man in a wheelchair named Henry Gibeau, who was among the last to see Wishart alive. He had visited the Provenance at two-thirty in the afternoon on the fatal day. During his visit he engaged the victim in conversation. They were soon joined by a man, who had gray hair, who tried to dominate the conversation. Gibeau did not feel that Wishart was afraid of the man, but she did ignore him.

A human resources director at a local museum asked cops to check out a peculiar ex-employee.

The SPD heard from the friend of a psychic detective. The psychic, the friend said, had touched the door of the Provenance and had “seen many images.”

 

 

Detective DeFrancisco interviewed more friends of the victim, Sara Dechart and Barbara Derfel, in Dechart's home. Dechart had been one of Joyce's best friends at one time. When Joyce was getting the shop ready to open, she'd been the one who helped out painting. And she had helped keep the gallery running when Joyce was sick and had gone off to the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa for treatment. For a long time Dechart had a key to the gallery, along with the electronic gate opener for the parking garage. However, she had given those items back in May 2003 when she and Wishart had a “falling-out.” In fact, she hadn't spoken to Wishart since then.

Derfel said that at one time she had a key to Wishart's house, in case of emergency, but she had never had a key to the business. Like Dechart, Derfel hadn't spoken to Wishart since the spring of the previous year.

 

 

On February 9, Detective Woods spoke with a post office worker named Cindy Lizarralde, who complained that she'd had a coworker back in 2002 who was creepy. She'd gone out with him twice and was never sure she knew his real name.

He said he was “Charlie Brown.”

He threatened suicide and would sometimes utter horrible things: “Go fuck yourself, whore. I'm going to slash your face and stab your heart.” She'd been to his apartment and he hardly had any furniture. He liked clowns and deviant art. He
was
a clown and visited kids' hospitals in makeup, which she remembered thinking was not a good idea.

When a lady at the post office died of a drug overdose, Lizarralde asked Brown if he killed her. He didn't deny it, but instead referenced another clown, saying, “You mean like John Wayne Gacy?”

The witness remembered where the guy lived, and this was how Detective Woods learned his real name (which wasn't Charlie Brown). Woods determined that, though the man was bipolar and had anger issues, he was miles from Sarasota at the time of Wishart's murder.

On February 18, a little more than a month after the murder, Detective DeFrancisco returned the key to the Provenance to the victim's son Jamie. Leads were still pursued, but with each new crime the murder of Joyce Wishart pushed closer to cold-case status.

 

 

On February 24, police learned of two more Bike Man sightings. Two Sarasota women, Martha Fuller and Barbara Sperling, reported to police that on the day of the murder, a thin, middle-aged white man on a bicycle had creeped Fuller out, riding past her slowly in the street and staring at her. A man named Douglas Berdeaux reported seeing a man on a bike on the night of the murder, standing at the corner of Pineapple Avenue and Ringling Boulevard. The man was staring back toward the crime scene for such a long time that Berdeaux became concerned about his behavior.

During another night in February, a man was discovered wandering alone through downtown Sarasota. The guy turned out to be an insomniac who loved antiques. “It's safer to walk here than where I live,” he explained. Police swabbed him, anyway.

The owner of a furniture store reported that a strange man came in and said her shop's carpets smelled like “gunnysacks used to hold dead bodies.” The odd customer added that he was a stump remover by trade, and owned a wood grinder that could grind up “anything, including a dead body.”

Another man aroused suspicion when he told his bartender he'd heard that the killer cut out Joyce Wishart's ovaries. Police found the guy, who said he'd heard the rumor from his boss, who, in turn, said he'd overheard it from another customer while having coffee at Sarasota News and Books, a place where you could browse while simultaneously sipping award-winning coffee.

More than a month after the murder, weirdos were still coming out of the woodwork. One man reported that a man he knew was a murderer who made snuff films.

Detective Grant had a chat with the new tenants of the Provenance's space and advised them what to do if anyone appearing suspicious entered the premises. What a way to start a new business! When the space reopened, it was under police surveillance, and one man was investigated because he stood for an extended period of time at the approximate spot where Wishart's body had been posed.

 

 

Posing bodies in order to make an “artistic statement” was not a new concept. The most famous instance of this was the still-unsolved “Black Dahlia” murder in 1947 Los Angeles. It was the most famous American murder case not involving a celebrity. The victim was Elizabeth “Beth” Short, a twenty-two-year-old wannabe starlet, who was drifting around Southern California, depending on the kindnesses of strangers. Her body was found naked, severed into two pieces at the hips, the pieces arranged at the edge of a vacant lot, only inches from a sidewalk. Faceup, her arms were over her head; like Joyce Wishart's body, the legs were spread. Short's upper body was parallel, but off line with her lower half. A Sardonicus smile was carved into her face. Portions of her breast and thigh were cut out. A rose tattoo, or perhaps a rose-colored birthmark, on her leg had been removed and the skin containing it shoved up her rectum. The crime scene was exquisite, emulating as it did artwork of the grotesque aesthetic school. The murderer wanted everyone to see the beauty in this unthinkable ugliness.