The Skeleton Crew (20 page)

The 2002 case was geographically close to home. A man was found floating in the Sudbury River west of Boston. According to the police report, the victim—a solidly built white male with a goatee—had suffered “multiple traumas” and was found wrapped in “bedding and other items.” The letters
PK
were tattooed on his right shoulder in an ornate Old English script.

Bobby posted the details on the Doe Network. Carol Cielecki, new to the Doe Network in Pennsylvania and fresh from the Sean Lewis Cutler solve, recalled reading about a missing Texas man with such a tattoo. Bobby passed along the tip to Framingham, Massachusetts, police, who determined
the body was that of Peter Kokinakis,
age forty, who had disappeared from Houston earlier that year.

In 2003, a ten-year-old boy rounding up cattle
on horseback discovered skeletal remains in a remote area of northeast Utah. The victim's hands had been bound with electrical tape. A Job Corps ID card with the name Arthur Wuestwald lay on the ground nearby.

Bobby traced the name on the ID card, but the birth date did not jibe with the estimated age of the remains. The Arthur Wuestwald he found by name—a Nevada resident—was much older than the dead eighteen- to twenty-year-old. Bobby notified the Rich County sheriff in Utah, who contacted the elder Wuestwald in Nevada. Wuestwald turned out to be the victim's father. Someone had bound and killed Arthur Wuestwald Jr. of White River, South Dakota, and left him on a remote path in the mountains near Randolph, Utah. His father hadn't seen his son since the seventeen-year-old left the family home in 1984 to attend cooking school with the Job Corps.

In 2004, Bobby located a man who had been missing from Minnesota since 1979. He was safe and sound, but not interested in being found and seemingly unconcerned that his family had been worried about him for decades.

In his years of active web sleuthing, Bobby was responsible for six Doe Network success stories. He downplayed his solves, crediting his access to national missing-person alerts and the NCIC database. Vicki Siedow said of Bobby, whom she counts as a dear friend but has yet to meet
in person, that he always did the right thing for the right reasons. He was a down-to-earth nice guy, not all about ego, she said. I saw that Bobby had modestly told a reporter from Quincy's
Patriot Ledger
it was pretty simple to locate someone with an unusual name such as Wuestwald. He rarely mentioned that he had helped raise hundreds of dollars to help Angela Parks's children exhume her body from the potter's field where she was buried in Texas and take her home to Kentucky.

Bobby showed me around Quincy one day in June 2011. Boston Harbor is cleaner these days, and Quincy's tony new restaurants along the city's waterfront—a disconcerting mix of natural beauty and urban wasteland—have started luring diners from downtown Boston.

Town River Bay, with its khaki-colored water, splintering old piers, and moored pleasure boats, popped into view. We rolled by the peninsula's one convenience store and we were soon in the Snug Harbor section of Germantown, once a place of safety and rest for broken-down sailors.

In the years following Quackie's murder, the Quincy court system became known for its tough supervision of batterers. Offenders' probation was revoked if they so much as called or sent postcards to women they had been ordered not to contact. Weapons were seized from abusive men. Bobby Lingoes helped implement the program, recognized as the most comprehensive domestic violence intervention program in the state and one of few of its kind in the country. If the program had been in place in 1988, it might have prevented a knife-wielding David Compston from terrorizing his mother and killing Quackie.

Germantown was largely unchanged, Bobby told me, since he had moved out. Patty died in 2010 at age sixty. Always fragile, she had never quite recovered from losing her son. She was waked by the same funeral home as Quackie and buried next to him.

Bobby, happy with his new wife, Debbie, who tended a local bar, said it was time to move on from looking at dead bodies. It was getting kind of depressing.

Even though it had been a few years since he left behind the world
of the missing and unidentified, he didn't seem completely free of his former addiction. Minutes after we met in the parking lot of the Quincy police station, he thrust into my hands copies of recent Doe Network case files. He waved a printout of a case, a skeleton of a John Doe discovered a month earlier in California. On the report, the estimated date of death and the date the body was found were identical. “A skeleton?” Bobby practically shouted. “On the same day he died?”

Another report that seemed to nag at Bobby was about a man who turned up dead in 1991 near Niagara Falls.
This John Doe was a big guy,
more than six feet tall, 215 pounds. He had a beard, a nine-inch scar that stretched from his right ankle to his shin, and a riot of tattoos on both arms, his right shoulder, his sternum, his left knee, his chest. The tattoos were graphic, disturbing: flaming swastikas, spiders on a web, bats, the Masonic all-seeing-eye pyramid, a flaming, snake-encircled cross, a circle with four triangular, inward-facing points evocative of the symbol used by the Ku Klux Klan.

Some of these tattoos are de rigueur among prison inmates, Bobby informed me. If the man had ever been incarcerated, his fingerprints would be on file in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by police, the FBI, the CIA, and NCIC. “Are you telling me no one has searched prints from AFIS against NCIC?” Bobby demanded.

I learned later that, in fact, no one had. Under the same high-tech roof as the FBI facility that houses the NCIC is a repository of sixty million sets of fingerprints, none of which were compared to any available prints from the unidentified tattooed man. In fact, there are several national fingerprint databases, each separate and accessible only to a specific few.

In another case Bobby found from 1991, a young woman was found dead in Arkansas. The Jane Doe,
a statuesque blonde,
was a prostitute with a criminal record who used a variety of aliases. The amount of information on her whereabouts, jobs, and acquaintances over the years, coupled with many available photographs of the woman, seemed to Bobby ample material to solve a case that had languished for two decades. Bobby believed, rightfully so, that his accomplishments as a concerned citizen made gaps in the system painfully clear. Law enforcement wasn't looking at websites like the Doe Network, Bobby said. He
didn't know why they didn't search off-line for unique identifiers, as he did.

As we drove down the nautically named streets, Bobby, in a tropical-­print shirt, black pants, athletic shoes, and black Adidas baseball cap, his gravelly voice like that of a character out of
The Sopranos
, talked about growing up in the projects. He sounded nostalgic, even though many of his memories were awful ones. He pointed out the sidewalk where Quackie fell, mortally wounded, then another spot a few yards away where his best friend's brother stabbed his friend to death in an argument, and another street corner where yet another friend died violently.

We pulled up next to a shabby basketball court not far from where Compston had murdered Quackie on Taffrail Road. Rectangles of fractured pavement once painted green had faded to gray with weathered, once-red three-point arcs; a partially deflated basketball was abandoned just outside the peeling foul lines. Bobby kept the TrailBlazer's engine running as he pointed to discarded soda cups and cracks in the court's surface. “It's a shit hole,” he said. Just beyond the edge of the court a black chain-link fence, a strip of mud-colored sand, and weeds bordered the bay. Sunlight glinted on the calm, grayish green water.

Across the channel, a factory loomed like an iron colossus, intimidating even from a distance. A small city of rusty tanks, decrepit buildings, bulging pipes, silos, and metal catwalks framed smokestacks that looked like they emitted something toxic.

“You see that plant? That used to be Procter & Gamble, where they made Tide soap. We used to swim from that jetty”—he pointed to a tumble of rocks just beyond the fence—“to that tank with the yellow stairs”—a metal fenced-in corral jutting into the water—“and jump off. We were known as the cleanest kids in Quincy because of the soap suds that come out of that plant.” Bobby chuckled.

I said I thought Procter & Gamble was one of the companies once notorious for dumping toxic chemicals into Boston Harbor. He seemed unfazed. We sat in the car, gazing at the basketball court and the bay. A lone bare-chested youth in gym shorts jogged slowly around the perimeter of the basketball court, past a patch of crabgrass between the edge of the court and the sidewalk where a gray boulder squatted, inscribed with black letters:

This park is dedicated to the memory and spirit of Robert “Quackie” Lingoes

Jan. 22, 1970–July 31, 1988

by his friends and the youth of Snug Harbor.

Every night, the 911 calls poured in. Heroin overdoses, breaking and entering, robberies. Once in a while, a murder.

A solution to his first case—the case that
earned him the nickname
“Bones Man”
from the Quincy cops and that led him to the Doe Network—­had eluded Bobby. He'd sifted through what he guessed were thousands of missing-persons reports for months, then years, consumed with doubt and frustration while promising tidbits strung him along like a mouse following a trail of crumbs.

If it was true that the victim in the woods had been a missing kid between age twelve and fifteen, the number of potential matches in NCIC was heartbreakingly astronomical: what seemed like every runaway in the world. He had to find a way to narrow down the numbers of possible matches.

A few years ago, a Massachusetts state trooper stowed the skeleton, Quincy's one and only John Doe, in the trunk of his car and drove it to the Smithsonian Institution for forensic analysis.

This time, instead of twelve to fifteen, the victim's age was estimated to be closer to thirty. In 2002, Bobby was certain he had found him: a man who had
gone missing from his home in northern Italy
whose passport had turned up in a Boston homeless shelter. But dental records did not match up, and Bobby was out of leads. The woods where the body was found have since been bulldozed for condominiums.

Bobby wasn't sure he would even want to solve the case now. He doubted anyone knew where those bones were stored. He grimaced. “Can you imagine telling the mother, ‘Here, ma'am, we found your son, but we can't give him to you because we don't know where he is'?”

In a bizarre Iowa case, not knowing the body's whereabouts was only part of the problem.

12

THE HEAD IN THE BUCKET

O
ne April day in 2001,
retired trucker Ronald Telfer
pulled into a Kearney, Missouri, truck stop at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Highway 92, northeast of Kansas City. Telfer was curious about something. Around a month earlier, he had spied a white plastic bucket apparently abandoned in the back parking lot. He bent to pick it up and saw it was filled with hardened concrete. Now he was back and saw the five-gallon bucket was still there. He tried slamming it against the pavement. A strong odor wafted toward him.

Later, Telfer would relay to a packed courtroom that the top cracked off and he saw something that looked like meat and skin—something that smelled very bad. Thinking it was animal remains, he slid the hunk of concrete out onto the pavement and took the bucket home to use for feeding his pigs.

Months later, on August twenty-seventh, construction worker Franklin Ray Dean maneuvered his truck through the same lot. Humidity hung in the air and waves of heat hovered over the ground; it was the summer's hottest day yet. Dean saw a cylinder of concrete blocking his path. He jumped down from the cab of his truck. When he went to shove the thing out of the way, he saw hair and what looked like a human skull protruding from the top.

Kearney police detective Fred Ferguson arrived. Under peeling gray chips, it looked like a human jaw was emerging like an artifact from an archaeological dig. Ferguson made a mental note that whoever the jaw be
longed to had had quite a bit of bridgework.

Dean's discovery set in motion a series of events that spanned five years and four states. It involved hundreds of thousands of dollars and a race between a web sleuth and law enforcement to solve a case with a ticking clock. It was a saga of luck, greed, family ties, karma, depravity, and, some believed, divine intervention.

Eight months earlier, in Bellevue, Iowa, an unassuming Mississippi River town four hundred miles from Kearney,
Jan Buman and her boyfriend, Gregory May,
were talking about sunny Florida. May, fifty-five, with blue eyes and thick sandy hair gone gray, had six months earlier moved to Bellevue from Wisconsin, where he'd led a somewhat odd dual existence: he was a pioneering tattoo artist with a passion for nineteenth-century antiques.

May owned tattoo shops and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as one of the Midwest's fastest, most talented tattoo artists at a time when tattoo artists were few and far between. He even taught the trade to his ex-wife, who became one of the first female tattoo artists in the United States and an originator of the concept of permanent makeup. Celebrities would one day flock to Sheila May's LA salon for tattooed-on eyeliner, eyebrows, and lip color.

Greg May, long divorced, was dating Jan, an attractive blonde who lived in nearby Galena, Illinois. The couple often shared meals and drinks at a riverfront bar down the street from May's rented aluminum-sided two-story house.

“Six feet tall and distinguished-looking, conservative in his politics and polite in his manner,” a
Los Angeles Times
reporter later described May, who was drawn to Bellevue in part so he could emulate Mark Twain in living on the Mississippi. May lived and breathed all things Civil War.

May was tired of Midwest winters. Pick out a house, he told Jan, tossing her a Sarasota real estate brochure. On January 11, 2001, Jan was happy and excited about the future. She had spent the past three days with May, leaving only to fetch clean clothes while May went to his chiropractor and to say farewell to a friend in Dubuque.

Right before she left, Jan, May, and May's housemate, a burly ex-bouncer with a walrus mustache Jan knew as Duke, had a smoke outside. Jan knew Greg had been friends with Duke, a fellow tattoo artist, for more than thirty years. Greg had inked many of the designs on Duke's beefy forearms. Duke and his girlfriend, Julie, who rented out the finished basement of May's house, were also planning to move to Florida, although Jan wasn't happy about it.

“I don't trust that Duke,” she had once told May over cocktails.

“Well, I don't trust that Julie,” he countered.

That winter night, Jan kissed May good-bye. Duke shot her a mean look, which she ignored. “See you at eight,” she called to May as she drove off.

Web sleuth Ellen Leach and a man she introduced as her boyfriend, Chip, slid into a booth opposite me. We were in a Waffle House on a busy commercial strip in Gulfport, Mississippi. The booths backed up to the kitchen and diners sat on counter stools over mugs of coffee and plates of pancakes and eggs.

Ellen planned to show me around
Gulfport on one of her rare days off from work, and although I kept assuring her that she was the one I came to see—she was the one who helped identify Greg May in the nick of time, saving prosecutors from a murder case without a body; she was the local hero featured on
48 Hours
—she fretted that she was somehow disappointing me after I came all the way from Boston to see her.

I had heard that Ellen Leach was one of the most effective web sleuths around, with at least five solves under her belt. She said it had all begun with her cousin, the infamous Susan Smith.

On November 2, 1994, twenty-three-year-old Smith stood tearfully outside the Union County Courthouse in Union, South Carolina, surrounded by TV cameras. She pleaded for the black man who had stolen her
car with her two young sons inside to return them unharmed: “I would like to say to whoever has my children, that they please, I mean please, bring 'em home to us where they belong.”

A thousand miles away, in Texas, Ellen watched in horror as this family drama unfolded. She combed websites for any kind of clues that would lead her to her cousins' missing boys, three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alexander.

Even after Smith ultimately shocked everyone by confessing there was no kidnapper, no mysterious black man—that she had let her 1990 Mazda Protegé roll into a lake with the boys still strapped into their car seats—Ellen didn't stop frequenting the sites. She found the Doe Network and signed on as a member. She intuitively started with the lists of unidentified. “You know they're dead,” Ellen said. “You know somebody is missing them, so you just got to find the connections.”

Ellen hadn't yet refined her technique. She would go on to appear on national media, earn a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward, be showered with gratitude by one family of the missing, and ultimately shun the group she helped put on the map.

Ellen had grown up in a small rural farming community in Michigan and thought for a time she might like to become a fashion designer. But her parents couldn't pay for college, so instead she took a job in an automobile factory in Detroit. It closed and she followed her brother to Texas, where for more than twenty years she staffed the steam table of prepared foods in a Kroger supermarket, a job she wouldn't call intellectually challenging. Ellen found herself spending more and more time logged onto the Doe Network.

Susan Smith might have led her to the Doe Network, but I thought I knew what kept Ellen there. She may have been robbed of a college education, but her considerable brainpower—like that of many of the web sleuths I'd encountered—was completely wasted on her day job. Finding the owner of a head in a bucket of cement—now,
that
was a challenge worthy of Ellen Leach.

At around eight in the evening on January 11, 2001, Jan Buman parked in the rear of 212 North Riverview Street. To her surprise, the back door was locked. Greg had told her he would leave it open for her. She rang the doorbell. No answer. Jan walked around to the front door. The shade was mostly drawn, but she saw someone who looked like May from the rear. She could only see Greg from the waist down. He was sitting, unmoving, in a kitchen chair, legs crossed and his hands on his lap. Jan recognized Duke's girlfriend Julie Johnson, a slight, pale woman with cropped dark hair and oversized tinted glasses. Julie was pacing as if she was nervous, and wiping off something Jan couldn't see.

Jan went to the Frontier Cafe without May, ordered a bowl of soup and a beer, and called the house. The answering machine picked up. “Why won't you answer the door?” Jan pleaded into the recorder. “Are you mad at me?” She stopped by again. This time she saw nothing through the partially opened shade, but she heard thumps and crashes from within.
Greg must be mad,
she thought, to stomp around slamming doors like that.

She called the property manager, who wouldn't unlock the door for her; she wasn't a tenant. Freezing, she got back in her truck, wondering what she had done to make Greg so angry.

The next Sunday, Julie Johnson informed Jan on the phone that May had gone to Chicago and he'd decided he didn't want Jan to join him in Florida after all. Jan stopped by three days later. Greg's car, his furniture, and all his Civil War memorabilia were gone. It wasn't the first time a guy had dumped Jan unceremoniously. But she hadn't figured Greg May for a coward who snuck off without saying good-bye.

Ellen Leach's boyfriend, Keith Glass, sat opposite me in the Waffle House booth. Bald and stocky with a full salt-and-pepper beard and round metal-rimmed glasses, Glass looked to me like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were a biker dude in a muscle T-shirt. Glass had earned the nickname Chip as a boy because his reliable chip shot always got him to first base. He ordered only a cup of coffee, patting his rounded belly
apologetically; Ellen, tall and lanky, dug into her plate of waffles and eggs and bacon.

More than five feet eight, Ellen, a onetime tomboy, has a strong jaw and cleft chin, a wide, mobile mouth, and gray hair to her shoulders. That day she cut a mannish figure in jeans, zip-front fleece jacket, and black leather sneakers. Chip told me that customers at the Hobby Lobby, where Ellen worked as a cashier, approached her saying, “Excuse me, sir.” Then they'd take a closer look and say, “Oh, sorry, ma'am.” Sometimes, the other way around. I snuck a glance at Ellen to see if she was taking offense, but her baby-blue eyes were crinkled in amusement. With the loquacious Chip around to entertain me, she could relax.

They met—where else?—online, on a gaming website offering Monopoly, Risk, card games, puzzles of all kinds. They played Keno. You could chat in real time with other players. What did Glass say that attracted Ellen's attention? He laughed. “Oh, ma'am, we don't even want to get into that.” Being called “ma'am” usually drives me crazy, but from Chip it was charming. “There was a bunch of us that were joking around and stuff,” Ellen explained. “I'm always flirting and carrying on in there,” Glass said. “She just took it serious.”

What clinched Ellen's move from Texas to Mississippi was a photo she sent Chip of herself in waders, displaying two ten-pound redfish like slick, speckled torpedoes. Ellen had regularly fished Christmas Bay off Galveston until one day a gar—she thinks it was a gar, scaly and needle-nosed with a mouthful of sharp teeth—as big as a canoe circled her lazily. She froze, hardly daring to breathe, until it swam away. Chip also liked to fish. “I just want something I can fight with for a half hour and not marry,” he quipped.

Chip was her backbone, Ellen averred. She'd show him a case and see if he thought her match was worthy. Chip looked at his hands and said Ellen was the one who put in all the hard work. Chip told me proudly that Ellen helped identify missing Pittsburgh teen Jean-Marie Stewart, whose remains had lain nameless in a Florida morgue for twenty-seven years.

The girl's abduction and murder, the length of time she remained unidentified, and the nature of her relationship with a woman who dedicated her own web database to finding her would fuel some heated exchanges within the web sleuth community for years.

“If police in Florida had Jean's dental records, if the remains of a young woman with an overbite were discovered only a few miles from where Jean disappeared a year later, why did it take more than a quarter-century for a volunteer advocate to put two and two together?” wrote a reporter in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
. Chip's version was more colorful: How come a couple of boofunkles from Mississippi solved this case before law enforcement did?

I'd never heard the term “boofunkle” but I heard it again within an hour: it's what Chip and Ellen named their stocky mixed-breed rescue dog, who bounded to greet us at their modest ranch in a subdivision off busy Route 49.

For a time, Ellen had parked a 1968 Cadillac hearse out front. She had picked it up at a Texas auction for a dollar. Its jet-black finish gleamed in the sun; its elongated landau roof sported a metal detail like the Nike swoosh. With a few new parts its oversized engine purred. Ellen's brother stowed a fake casket in the back and she and Chip propped two plastic skeletons up front. The car had been a hit in Texas, drawing openmouthed stares, whistles, and admiring grins.

Mississippians' reactions were different. On Halloween, Chip and Ellen noticed that trick-or-treaters avoided their house. At the drive-in, they never got served with the skeletons in tow. A neighbor who ran a hair salon out of her home complained that her customers were being scared off. Mississippi mechanics were too superstitious to work on it. After nine years of owning the iconic car, Ellen was forced to sell it.

Before we walked inside the house, Chip and Ellen warned me about the cats: there was Stinky, rescued from fueling the bloodlust of thirteen fight-to-the-death pit bulls; diabetic Francis, who needed injections twice a day; gray six-toed Grasshopper; Cali, a calico bequeathed to Chip by an elderly lady entering a nursing home; and Solo, a tailless white fluff ball prone to ambushing people's feet. In addition to the cats and Boofunkle, since Ellen had moved in, the couple had nursed three-legged lizards, one-eyed fish, and a shepherd who lost three legs to bone cancer.

In a garage converted to a spare room, Chip's and Ellen's computers sat on adjacent desks, Chip's covered with overflowing ashtrays, video feeds from a security camera aimed at the driveway, wallets, lighters, sticks of incense, vitamins in bottles, and a ragged bouquet of pens in an old flower
pot. Cali sprawled on my lap and Ellen started poking the power button of her Hewlett-Packard like a parrot pecking a tough nut. In front of her were two monitors that allowed her to compare, side by side, a missing-person report with details about unidentified remains.