JF Gonzalez - Fetish.wps (30 page)

“I'm sorry for being such an asshole. I'm just worried about you going out there by yourself."

“I'll be fine,” she'd said, kissing him.

Now she sighed and crossed the street at the green light. The day was cold and overcast. The streets were wet, the curbs lined with slush. The area she was in was an older section of town, near Notre Dame University. She had been warned that the area wasn't the best to walk in at night, but Rachael could take care of herself. Besides, she found it rather quaint. It reminded her of the town she had gone to college in. In fact, her sense of familiarity with the area was so strong that she walked through the area slowly, taking in every detail; the old brick buildings, the row houses with their faded porches, the streets crammed with cars parked along the curb. Snow had fallen two days before and another storm was expected to hit in the next twenty-four hours, the last winter storm of the season according to forecasters. Part of her welcomed it and part wished that it wasn't so.

She was eager to drive out to the area on the outskirts of the city on the north side where the bodies of the three victims were found in such weather. Alice Henderson, the first South Bend victim, had disappeared around the same time of the year and it was assumed she was dumped in the area amid the hard ground and snow. Rachael wanted to rummage through the area and see what it had been like for the killer, fantasize what it must have been like for him to drive out on a snowy, cold morning and drag Alice's body out to the woods, then bury her in the cold, hard packed earth. Something might help trigger something, point her in a new direction in the case. It was worth a shot.

Once across the street she spied a small coffee shop on the corner. She darted inside and reveled in the sudden warmth, glad to be inside because frankly the area she was in wasn't the best. Daryl had warned her that the neighborhood south of Notre Dame University was bad, and the students were usually warned to avoid trekking through the streets alone due to the high crime rate. But the neighborhood was where two of the victims lived and presumably the third had resided there as well, so she had to be brave and forsake common sense. Now her common sense was taking over, telling her to get her ass in a business establishment where there were people.
Just because you work out
and know enough martial arts to kick most men's asses doesn't necessarily mean that
you're invincible
, she thought as she pulled off her gloves in the waiting area of the coffee shop.
There's always somebody bigger and badder
.

Her eyes traced the small café for an empty booth or a stool at the counter.

Luckily there was one empty booth left in the place, and she walked over to it gratefully.

She didn't have the patience to sit at the counter amid the dirty old men and the winos who were gathered there.

A middle-aged waitress showed up wearing make-up that made her look like a clown, and Rachael asked for coffee. She waited, hugging herself beneath the long black leather trenchcoat she wore. When the coffee arrived she clutched it, reveling in the warmth through her black leather gloves. She sipped it and sat at the booth, drinking coffee and thinking about what her next move would be.

When the waitress re-emerged with an order pad, Rachael realized she was hungry. She hadn't eaten anything all day. She took a cursory glance through the menu, and without thinking ordered a chicken-fried steak dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, vegetables, and a salad. She also ordered a tall glass of water. The waitress jotted the order down and left. Rachael sipped her coffee and decided that now would be a good time to work on her notes and see where she was on her investigation of the case.

She reached into her satchel and pulled out her notes and papers and looked through them. Sipping her coffee intermittently, she was able to track the last days’ events and come to several conclusions.

Day one: after her arrival in South Bend and checking into the Sheraton near the Michiana Regional Airport, she had slept until noon. Then she'd risen in time to shower and meet the detective that Daryl had talked to two years ago. His name was Chuck Flowers, and he was in charge of investigating the three murders. He met her for lunch in the hotel's restaurant, and it was apparent from the git-go that Chuck was going to prove to be a hostile witness. “I've already told the L.A. cops everything I could think of,” he'd said as they sat in the restaurant's smoking section. “I don't know what else I could tell you that you haven't heard already."

“Humor me,” Rachael had said, turning on the charm.

Chuck went through what she already knew: Alice Henderson disappeared in March of 1984; Howard Manheim, age 23, vanished in April of 1985. In July of that year a group of hikers trekking in the woods stumbled upon a nude, decapitated male corpse just one hundred yards off Interstate 33. A search for the missing head led investigators to the head of Howard Manheim partially submerged in some bushes fifty yards away. The body of the first victim was never identified and his head was never recovered. Likewise, Howard Manheim's body was never found. In October of that year, a group of children came across bone fragments. The resulting search came up with the rib bones, spinal column, and leg bones of Alice Henderson. Her head was never found.

Chuck Flowers related how he picked up on the case soon after the identification of Alice Henderson. He had been amazed at the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole two years previously, and had been following up on major serial killing cases ever since. He had begun by checking to see if there were any other missing persons in the South Bend area that resembled the sociological background of Alice Henderson and Howard Manheim—both of whom were drug users and prostitutes. In the year that followed he had found that there were one hundred and thirty-six missing persons that closely resembled the make-up of Henderson and Manheim. With a skeleton crew, he had his men follow up on those missing persons while he and two assistants attempted to track the last few days of Manheim and Henderson.

“Every lead we came to led us to the area south of the university,” he explained.

“It's pretty much the red light district of South Bend. Bars, strip joints, porno shops, massage parlors, a fetid mess. Gangs run rampant in the area, and addicts openly shoot up in the alleys. The area precinct is always getting calls from residents complaining about hookers screwing their johns on their front lawns in full view of their children. And all this going on within blocks of a Catholic University. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!"

Rachael asked him about the kind of people who lived and frequented the area.

Chuck laid it out quite neatly. The red light district was two blocks south of the University of Notre Dame and four blocks north of the civic center and city hall. The area was largely inhabited by poor African-Americans. The kids in the area ran with two or three different gangs that committed everything from vandalism to strong-armed robbery and murder. Mixed in with this were the bars and clubs that catered to the university students. “The kids know to drive to the clubs in the area rather than walk there. We've had several students attacked walking those streets. A few women have been raped.” He leveled a fatherly gaze at her, as if warning her not to go strolling through the area on foot after dark. It was a nice gesture, and Rachael pressed him on.

Slightly to the south and the east of the Civic Center were the older suburbs which saw the kinds of gangs inner-city Los Angeles was not used to; these gangs were comprised of largely middle-class white kids who adopted the dress and lingo of L.A.

gangsters and rap artists. Most were simply tagging crews, but at least five different gangs were into drug trafficking. They came to the red light district largely to attend the strip clubs and occasionally hire a prostitute.

“So they aren't involved in the prostitution trade at all?"

“Nah. These kids lack the sophistication for that. The prostitution rings here are run mostly by bikers."

Alice Henderson had come from the northwest side, a wealthy suburb that was largely inhabited by doctors, lawyers, and business executives. The housing tract Alice had grown up in was a gated community, with two and three story mansions sitting on at least two acres of land apiece. Alice had seemed to have it all: good grades, acceptance into Yale University, voted most popular girl in high school, and a cheerleader for the school football team. But in her senior year she started running around with a bad crowd.

Her father, an influential physician who was on the faculty of the University of Indiana School of Medicine, bailed her out of jail one night when she and a group of her friends had gone on a drunk driving binge, clipping parked cars along Lincolnway West. Alice was back at it the following week, seen in public hanging on the arm of a boy who was a member of the Cruisers gang, one of the gangs that came from the southside. She left home after graduation and moved in with him, and a year later she was working the main drag near the airport after having had a falling out with the gang. It seemed they couldn't provide her with the crystal methamphetamine she'd become hooked on. A Russian immigrant named Eugene Shectman could, provided she work for him. She could, and she did.

That had been in November of 1983. Alice Henderson worked the streets for Eugene for three months before graduating to a massage parlor on Main Street. A month later she was back on the streets. An acquaintance of the girl had told Chuck that her father had been scouring the area for her and that she had quit the massage parlor for fear he would find her and persuade her to leave for good. Apparently Alice still had a conscience and a soft spot for home and family, but her stubborn streak made her leave the job so her father wouldn't find her. Nonetheless, she worked the streets for close to a month before she picked up her last john.

Chuck pointed out on a map of South Bend where Alice was last seen—the corner of La Salle and High Street, a prime spot for the whores that walked the streets. Traffic from the business district and the civic center came through here and the main highway, Interstate 31, ran through this spot carrying college students from the University of Indiana and Notre Dame University. Interstate 31 ran north and south, from the lower middle-class suburbs in the south, to the wealthier suburbs of the north where Alice Henderson was from. Rachael wrote all this down. It was going to be a lot of research and retracing Alice's steps.

Howard Manheim was a different story. An acquaintance of the Rippers, a rival of the Cruisers gang, Howard was a male prostitute who kept his homosexuality a secret from his gang friends. He kept a one-room loft apartment on the edge of the business district where he lived with an older black male named Patrick Wilson, who was initially arrested for the murder. The two had been fighting at the time of his death, and police had been called to the apartment to break up a fight between them that ended with Howard going to jail. The story that came out in the aftermath of Howard's body being found was that two days after getting out of jail, Howard told his lover that he was going out to make them some money and that he would be in before midnight. Patrick, who had been trying to dissuade Howard from peddling his body, got Howard to take some condoms with him—the recent AIDS scare was giving him second thoughts about spending more time with Howard, hence their recent fights. Patrick spent the evening in the company of his sister and her boyfriend and a group of their friends; a perfect alibi. Howard never returned home.

The area in which he worked the streets was the same stretch of road that Alice Henderson disappeared.

The unidentified body was another matter. The first body found, it had been fresher, killed perhaps three days before being discovered. The remains were that of a young man, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, with a slight build and brown hair. He had an appendectomy scar that was old. He appeared to be well nourished—in fact, the coroner reported finding undigested kernels of corn in his stomach. Retraction of the neck muscles suggested he might have died as a result of decapitation.

Rachael looked over her notes and pursed her lips. Death by decapitation, and the other two victims too decomposed to make an accurate diagnosis. All efforts to identify the fresher victim had failed, and the closest they had come was a homeless man saying he had spent the night at the YMCA with a young man who bore a similar physical description of the victim found in the woods. Unfortunately, the homeless man could not recall the young man's name. But his description fit the remains perfectly; he had even been able to describe the victim's features, which were sketched up by a police artist and posted on various missing person's reports. Nobody had stepped forward to claim the body or to report the sketched face as a loved one who had recently gone missing.

Rachael's salad arrived and she dug into it hungrily, retracing her last few days in South Bend. After her meeting with Chuck Flowers, he had driven her through the downtown and red light district, pointing out various points of interest to her. Then they had driven out to the area where the bodies had been found. It was on the north side of town, past the suburbs and universities, and still looked the same as it did when the crimes were committed. They parked on the side of Interstate 33 and Chuck led her through the woods, explaining his theory that the killer had to have known the area well enough to park on a side gully that would leave his car unobscured by passing traffic.

From there he'd brought the bodies in on foot, carrying them one hundred yards into the woods away from prying eyes where he clumsily buried them.

Rachael recorded her findings that night in her cassette recorder and notebook, then rented a car the following day. She went to the library and spent the day researching the city of South Bend, its government, racial make-up, and history. Twelve years ago when the murders were committed, South Bend was pretty much the same as it always had been: a mid-size mid-western metropolis where people lived, worked, and went on about their middle-class, mid-western lives. The crime statistics for the years the murders were committed were slightly lower then they were now, but that was a given. She did some research on the immigrant population, finding out when they started arriving in the city and from where. She also researched the city's gang problem, making a note to speak more about it to Chuck for future conversations.