The Skeleton Crew (22 page)

Miller was charged with theft and interstate transport of stolen property. The notion that May was alive and well, donating Jesse James letters to museums, didn't fool investigators. As they pressed Miller on May's whereabouts, she confirmed what they suspected: May was dead. She told them she was in the basement that day in January. She heard a ruckus upstairs. It sounded like May and DeBruin arguing. She ran up to the kitchen to find May lying on the floor and DeBruin saying, “I killed him, it was an accident. I hit him too hard and I killed him.” She and DeBruin wrapped the body in plastic bags and sealed them with duct tape. She helped DeBruin drag May to DeBruin's Volvo. She cleaned up the blood. He was gone for hours. He returned and told her, “Greg always liked the Mississippi River.”

Soon after the Missouri museums received the letters and DeBruin and Miller were arrested, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation dredged the Mississippi and asked farmers and hunters to keep an eye out for anything wrapped in plastic that might be human remains. For Don and Shannon May, wishful thinking was over. They printed five hundred color posters offering a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who came across the black trash bags wrapped in duct tape containing their father's remains. They drove grimly through two counties and a stretch of Illinois plastering gas stations, bars, grocery stores, post offices, parks, and churches with the flyers.

But despite Miller's confession, Iowa assistant attorney general James Kivi knew what he was up against. Before he could prove Doug DeBruin killed Greg May, he had to prove May was dead. Most of the evidence was circumstantial, Jackson County attorney John L. Kies pointed out
later. It was true that Doug DeBruin had gotten caught with Greg May's goods; that no one had heard from Gregory May since he was last seen with DeBruin; and that May's car and wallet had been abandoned in Aurora. But all they had of Greg May himself was a spot of his blood on the sleeve of a jacket.

In December 2001, Julie Ann Miller, also known as Julie Johnson and Julie Ann Kern, pleaded guilty to stealing seventy thousand dollars' worth of May's antiques. It had been an eventful year for Miller and Doug DeBruin. Around a week after a neighbor had seen May's replica clipper ship loaded into a yellow moving van that January, the pair drove to Missouri, then to Corpus Christi, Texas, stopping along the way to sell May's possessions at flea markets. A photo taken around this time shows DeBruin sitting like a peddler surrounded by his wares at a Texas flea market. Behind him are items Don May was sure belonged to his family.

Back in Kearney, Missouri, police had exhausted all leads on the identity of the man whose head was found in the bucket. Lieutenant Tom O'Leary had seen busts done by forensic sculptor Frank Bender profiled on
America's Most Wanted
. Bender, with a pointed goatee, shaved head, and hooded eyebrows, had over thirty-three years done more than forty busts for law enforcement, earning a reputation as eccentric but astoundingly effective at giving faces to the unidentified. Bender sometimes sat with a skull for days, as if trying to channel the spirit of its owner. What would the dead man's expression be like? How would he wear his hair? “I call myself the re-composer of the decomposed in the classical fashion,” Bender reportedly once said. Law enforcement had come to rely on him for conjuring—with very little information—an incredibly accurate portrayal of what a person had looked like in life.

What did this particular skull tell him? That the individual was middle-­aged. A little on the heavy side. Balding.

Using charts developed by anatomy experts that determined the thickness of tissue at various points over the skull, Bender molded clay directly on the skull, made a plaster cast, and sanded, filed, and painted the resulting bust. Early in his career Bender had used wigs, but ultimately decided he'd have more control if he sculpted the hair himself.

On September 26, 2002, Bender's bust arrived in Missouri. Lieutenant O'Leary was blown away. He had sent off a skull; what he got back was almost human.

The man in the bust had a wide mouth, receding hairline, jowly neck. His nose was straight and somewhat prominent, his eyes deep-set under bushy brows. He looked like a pleasant enough fellow, a man you'd exchange the time of day with at the post office.

The reconstruction sat on O'Leary's file cabinet. It stared at O'Leary when he walked in in the morning. It was the last thing he saw when he went home at night. O'Leary had faith that one day the right lead would come in—the lead that would result in an identification.

Around a year after Bender completed the bust, O'Leary posted photos of it on a site he had come across called the Doe Network.

Ellen Leach saw the photo of Bender's reconstruction and the details of the discovery at the truck stop. She was convinced the head in the bucket was Jimmy Hoffa's.

At first, this struck me as laughable. Ever since former Teamsters leader Hoffa vanished in 1975 on his way to meet two mafiosi, his name was on everybody's lips whenever a body turned up in the Hudson River or inside a cement bridge piling. There's an Aimee Mann song about how Jimmy Hoffa jokes are passé, yet Hoffa could be the poster child for the whole cold case movement. He's missing. There's no body. He was almost certainly murdered.

The bust did look a little like pictures I'd seen of Hoffa. Ellen believed for a time that the head in the bucket had to be a mob hit, the MO reminding her of cement shoes. Thirty years too late, her theory didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I realized that a web sleuth's ability to brainstorm,
to extrapolate, to make leaps of faith, might be correlated with her success rate.

The bust showed up under listings for the unidentified, but the Doe Network's parallel database for the missing did not include Greg May. Volunteers who scoured the media for missing-person cases simply hadn't come across him. Other national and international sites dedicated to missing persons didn't include May, either, so his name did not come up when Ellen tried to match characteristics of the middle-aged man Bender had depicted to men reported missing.

Not finding what she was looking for in all her usual haunts, Ellen started to scan sites posted by medical examiners and police departments in individual states. Since Mike Murphy launched Las Vegas Unidentified in 2003, more states had been mounting sites devoted to the missing and unidentified, although by no means all states had them. So if, for instance, a body surfaced in Iowa, Ellen would check that state's missing first because, in her experience, the unidentified often turned up relatively close to home. If she didn't find anything, she would circle out geographically—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas—and expand the time frame.

Iowa's Missing Person Information Clearinghouse posted a weekly list of the missing, arranged alphabetically by name, with age, gender, date of last contact, originating agency, and not much else. It could, with some effort, be searched for physical characteristics and date of disappearance. But it was painstaking, tedious, and potentially fruitless to search record after record for a male of a certain height and age, say, when the estimated height might be off by as much as five inches and the age by ten years.

One day in 2004, Ellen spotted a new listing. Iowa had just posted (re-posted, but Leach didn't know that) a photograph of Gregory May, missing since 2001. The photo was of a man with shaggy hair, a mustache, and a warm smile.

In Kearney, Lieutenant O'Leary got an unrelated tip from a Colorado member of the Doe Network. It wasn't unusual for multiple volunteers to
work on cases simultaneously. This can result in law enforcement being inundated with proposed matches, each one time-consuming to investigate. The Doe Network, trying to be sensitive to this, submits only its members' most promising tips.

One of the conundrums of web sleuthing is this: law enforcement welcomes a positive match and abhors a waste of time. Web sleuths provide both. The trick to minimizing the time wasters, a California death investigator believes, is education. He spends hours on the phone encouraging web sleuths to submit to him only potential matches that have dental records, fingerprints, or DNA on file. He cajoles police into entering those identifiers into missing-person and unidentified records whenever they have them. It's a sad fact that many unidentifieds will never be matched to a missing person because their dental records are languishing in a filing cabinet, inaccessible to investigators.

The Doe panel sent a tip—not Ellen's—to O'Leary suggesting a missing Texas man could be a match for the head. The reported victim was last seen on or about September 1, 1998. O'Leary looked at pictures of the missing man. He thought they looked pretty damn close. A year after Bender fashioned the bust, O'Leary let himself hope. This tip felt like it was about to hit pay dirt.

On January 9, 2004, almost exactly three years after May was killed but still with no body in evidence, Iowa prosecutors charged Douglas DeBruin with his murder.

It wasn't easy to get DeBruin back to Iowa to stand trial. From federal custody in Arizona, he was sent to Wisconsin, where he'd violated parole on a firearms violation. DeBruin fought extradition to Iowa; requests and motions flew back and forth, with DeBruin steadfastly filing his own motions to dismiss because, he claimed, his right to a speedy trial had been violated.

DeBruin's trial was set for November 2004, then continued to January 2005. Just as jury selection was slated to begin and Don and Shannon May, bags packed, were about to board a plane to Iowa, DeBruin's public defender asked for a continuance. It was denied, then appealed to the Iowa
Supreme Court, which ordered a temporary stay. It would be three more months before the May siblings traveled to Iowa.

Prosecutors Kivi and Kies were frustrated by the delays but also worried about the challenge ahead of them. Prosecuting Douglas DeBruin would be a landmark case: Iowa's first murder trial without a body.

In 2003, dental charts had ruled out O'Leary's missing Texas man as a match for the Kearney truck stop victim. O'Leary looked at the bust, still sitting in his office. He imagined the eyes under the bushy brows glaring at him reproachfully.

After sending a few possible matches to the Doe Network area director for Missouri, Ellen heard nothing. This was not unusual; an area director, a volunteer like all other members, reviewed a possible match and then submitted it to an administrative group for a consensus on whether it was a convincing enough match to submit to law enforcement. Ellen got tired of waiting. (Eventually, what some web sleuths saw as the Doe Network's bureaucracy—the review by the potential match panel, the waiting for decisions to be handed down on whether a match is good enough, the rules prohibiting members from contacting law enforcement directly—caused a rift so serious that it temporarily shattered the organization.)

At the time, Ellen's proposed match went from the area director to O'Leary and then tumbled into a computer-glitch black hole. The area director sent it along again. Ellen got back in touch with her a couple of months later and learned that O'Leary had never received it.

There was some confusion, O'Leary recalled. The Doe Network was always sending him potential matches, sometimes two or three at a time. The batch that included Ellen's tip had apparently slipped through the cracks.

Leach was frustrated, to put it mildly. On March 17, 2005, O'Leary saw the Doe Network suggestion—Ellen Leach's suggestion—that Bender's
reconstruction looked just like a photo of a Gregory John May missing from Bellevue, Iowa. It was four months after she had submitted it. The age estimate and time of discovery of the skull indicated a possible match.

O'Leary decided to call the Bellevue police department, but he wasn't holding out much hope. He had pursued leads on forty-two men over the years and, he told me, the funny thing was, he had thought the Texas man who was ultimately ruled out looked a lot more like the head in the bucket. He tried not to get too excited about leads. He had been let down too many times.

Ellen had just gotten home from her shift at Home Depot. The phone in the kitchen rang. The voice was a stranger's, but Ellen instantly recognized Doe Network area director Traycie Sherwood's name. She and Sherwood had been trading e-mails for months. Ellen hung up and fist-pumped, yelling, “Awwright!”

She was elated, she told me later. She was happy to help out the police, the family. And Greg May was her first solve. She'd been web sleuthing for six years. So, yeah, she said, after the thousands of possible matches she'd put in over the years, to finally get one was a good feeling.

In Iowa, prosecutors Kies and Kivi couldn't believe their luck. Days before the DeBruin trial was scheduled to begin, pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. It looked like they might even have the body—or part of the body—they so desperately needed. Later, Kies told a TV crew, “I am not one to readily believe in karma, or perhaps the spirit of Greg May directing things. But wow, it certainly makes one think there may be forces out there working for justice other than us.”

“If this doesn't make you believe in a higher being,” the state's investigator said, “nothing will.”

The skull had been sent from Missouri to Iowa, where Greg May's dentist identified the restorations he had completed on May's teeth—the bridgework the Kearney detective had seen emerging from the concrete. Soon afterward, police called Don May to tell him that, after four years of searching, they finally had some of his father's remains. Don was relieved; the family had yearned to be able to put Greg May to rest. Don asked what they had found. The investigator hesitated. “Are you sure you want to know?” he said.

Working on information that Julie Miller had recently divulged, Don and Shannon May spent a Friday in mid-April pursuing, as one Dubuque reporter put it, “a morbid treasure hunt” along a steep, densely wooded hillside along US 52. Don, grimly rummaging among deer carcasses and trash, came upon what looked like a human bone. State forensic experts confirmed it was a right femur, sliced through with what looked like the blade of a saw. The siblings couldn't imagine things getting any worse.