by James Renner
Thanks to the families of Gina DeJesus and Mandy Berry for taking the time to talk to me at the FBI offices, and to Scott Wilson and Jennifer Meyers for setting that up.
As always, thank you to Detective Lieutenant Mark Spaetzel, for continuing to investigate Amy Mihaljevic’s abduction/murder. The same goes for Special Agent Phil Torsney and Jim Larkin. I am humbled by the effort, time, and passion the three of you have devoted to this unsolved case. I know you’ll solve it one day.
Thanks, Phil Trexler, for sharing your experience at the Death House on the day Robert Buell was executed. And thanks, Jack Swint, for giving me Buell’s personal documents. Yeah, thanks a lot, buddy.
Special thanks to retired Cuyahoga County Coroner Dr. Elizabeth Balraj, current Coroner Dr. Frank Miller, Jim in photography, and Heather in records for putting up with my frequent requests for documents and photographs, and for providing them in a timely manner. City hall could learn a thing or two from your office about open records.
To Mike Lewis and the rest of the crew at Confidential Investigative Services, thanks for always helping me track down killers or fugitives at a moment’s notice.
To Frank Lewis, my editor at the Free Times and now Cleveland Scene: thank you for letting me go on wild adventures on the clock, for editing many of these stories for the paper, and for re-editing them for this book. And thanks to art director Ron Kretsch of Free Times, and now Cleveland Scene, for help with photos.
A thank you to David Gray and his hard-working gang at Gray & Company— Chris Andrikanich, Jane Lassar, Frank Lavallo, Rob Lucas, and Jane Wipper—for helping me put this book together and getting me out to talk about these cases. Thanks to Laura Peppers for her talents as a copyeditor and Pat Fernberg for proofreading. And thanks to David Marburger for his attention to detail and care for the First Amendment.
Extra special thanks to my wife, Julie, for listening to me go on and on about each of these unsolved cases and for humoring me every time I was convinced I had solved one.
[EXCERPT]
Amy
My Search for
Her Killer
Secrets & Suspects in the
Unsolved Murder of
Amy Mihaljevic
James Renner
Gray & Company, Publishers
Cleveland
Chapter One
Taken
I fell in love with Amy Mihaljevic not long before her body was discovered lying facedown in an Ashland County wheat field. I fell for her the first time I saw that school photo Northeast Ohio TV stations flashed at the beginning of every newscast in the weeks following her kidnapping in the autumn of 1989—the photo with the side-saddle ponytail. First love in the heart of an eleven-year-old boy is consuming. One look at that brown-eyed girl and I knew that, if she had gone to my school, she would have been the one I passed notes to behind Miss Kline’s back.
But Amy didn’t go to my school. She went to Bay Middle, which was somewhere on another planet, far from the sub-suburban cow town where I lived with my father. I had a vague notion, though, that Bay Village was somewhere near my mother’s apartment in Rocky River. When I visited Mom every other weekend, I looked for Amy’s face in the crowds at Westgate Mall, hoping to find her wandering the aisles at Waldenbooks—as if she’d simply been lost there the whole time. I would be the one to lead her home.
Throughout the last part of October and the whole of November 1989, local newscasts began their six o’clock coverage with updates on the investigation. It was my routine to come home from school and turn on the TV to see if there were any new developments, to see if she’d finally been found. I watched closely. I learned to pronounce that difficult last name—“Mah-hal-leh-vick.” I memorized the face of her abductor from the police-artist sketches and searched for him in crowds.
With time, the reports became less frequent. A brief news segment in December covered her eleventh birthday party, which her family celebrated without her. Then the reports dropped off altogether. But I knew she was alive. She had to be. I was supposed to meet the girl in that photo. Maybe at a high-school football game five years in the future. Or in college. She would be found, and I would get to tell her that I never stopped looking for her.
On Thursday, February 8, 1990, I came home and flipped on the television. I sat cross-legged in front of it, and when the tube finally warmed up, her face was on the screen. It was that fifth-grade class picture again. I turned the volume up and listened as my innocence died.
Dead.
Murdered.
Dumped.
The news anchors cut to aerial pictures of County Road 1181 in Ashland County. Men in dark trench coats milled about a wheat field, tiny black specs in a sea of brown. The image was strangely ethereal, like the final glimpse of earth seen by a detached soul. It was here, they said, that Amy’s body had been found. A jogger had spotted what looked like a large doll lying on the frozen ground during a morning run. That patch of road they kept showing looked as far from the civilized cul-de-sacs of Bay Village as anyone could get. I didn’t see a single house in the background. Just a ragged field stretching to the horizon. It looked desolate. It looked unkind.
Police and FBI were guarded with information, but there were some details. We learned Amy was stabbed in the neck and hit on the head with a blunt instrument. No word on time of death. She was found fully clothed, but no one was sure what exactly that meant, yet. The composite sketches of her abductor appeared again, under an urgent voice-over. The news anchor couldn’t stress one fact enough—further tests were being conducted to determine if she had been sexually assaulted.
I swallowed the information like a diluted poison, feeling it burn away a kind of protective inner coating that had once made me feel safe. Years later, when I tried my first cigarette at Seven Ranges Boy Scout Camp, I would remember this feeling—like healthy tissue being singed by flames. Still, I couldn’t stop listening to the details. I couldn’t stop the words from forming scenarios in my head—silent films that obeyed all the new facts and ended with Amy’s body in that field.
I would not be the one who would find her and bring her back to her mother. That was a fantasy I could no longer indulge. Sitting there, staring into the smiling eyes of a girl now dead, I began to entertain a different dream. Adrenaline lit up my senses, making them detailed and fine. Now I pictured myself tracking down her killer, following him back to his lair. I saw myself knocking on his door, a snub-nosed revolver tucked under the waistband of my raggedy jeans. When he answered, I filled him with hot lead. I’d become an eleven-year-old vigilante.
“Jimmy?”
My dad, home from work, interrupted this macabre daydream.
“She’s dead,” I offered as a greeting.
“I know, I heard it on the radio,” he said. He came and sat next to me. He was bulky with muscle, a bushy beard shadowing his face, towering over me at five feet, eight inches. Most days, I didn’t see him until just before bedtime. He owned a fledgling construction business with his brother and often worked late pounding two-by-fours or laying shingle after the crew had already gone home. That day, he was home very early.
I quickly noted the affable expression on his face. His eyes were open wide and he was forcing a smile. I knew better than to trust that mock casualness. Then, as now, when my father adopts a look of non-concern it can only mean there’s some trouble that he’s still riddling out a way to break to me.
At first, I interpreted this as concern for my emotional state. He must have noticed how closely I had followed the case since October. But there was another reason he was home early, and what he said next linked me to Amy in a way that, as the coming years would reveal, not even her death could sever. Her death was about to become a part of me.
“I need you to know something,” my dad said. “I’ve been getting . . . some death threats.”
Inside a scrawny chest, my heart skipped a beat. “What? Somebody wants to kill you?”
My dad snapped off the telev
ision. Amy’s image shrank away to a speck of white in the center of the screen.
“No. Somebody wants to kill you.”
I didn’t know what to say. Was he joking? The fear in his eyes told me he definitely was not.
“Remember that guy I fired a couple months ago?”
“Yeah.”
My dad nodded his head.
“Why is he mad at me?”
“He’s not,” my dad said. “He’s mad at me. He’s really, really mad at me. And he’s crazy. That’s why I fired him. He’s not all there in the head. He left a note for me the other day. It said he was going to come after you. You or your sister.”
I thought of Joline, only four years old. I thought of Amy. I thought of two men I could hate.
“He’s all talk,” my dad continued. “He’s a coward, really. Okay? I don’t think he’s really going to try anything.”
Liar, I thought. I know you’re lying. Why else would you be telling me this?
He looked at me with a mixture of caution and shame. “Do you know what to do if you’re ever abducted?”
I hadn’t watched three months of reports on a kidnapping without learning a little. “Make a lot of noise,” I said. “I should scream for help and try to get away. I should kick him in the nuts?”
My dad laughed a little at that, which was good. It washed away some of the fear from his eyes. But he had reason to worry—especially as his business grew. There would be nights, years later, when we faced off against other enemies as they broke into our house. On those nights my dad carried a baseball bat. I carried a bowling pin. This was only the first day I realized such danger was possible. He wanted me to be prepared, as if he could sense the future.
“Good,” he said. “But what about if you find yourself back at their house and they tie you up or handcuff you to a couch?”
I tried to imagine such a thing.
“They said on the radio that they were going to do an autopsy on that girl, Amy,” my dad said. “I tried to think why they would want to do that after three months. I tried to think what kind of clues they were hoping to find. And then I thought if she was real smart they might find everything they needed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
My dad paused, perhaps searching for a way to put into words the idea he’d been running through his mind on the way home. Finally, he looked me directly in the eyes. No sign of fear anymore, only cold resolve. “If you ever find yourself in that situation, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to put everything you can into your mouth. Pull out pieces of the carpet. Bits of the couch. Hairs you might find lying on the floor. Knickknacks that you can reach. Anything. I want you to swallow it all down. As much as you can. That way, if this happens—if what happened to Amy Mihaljevic happens to you—when they do the autopsy, we can find out who did it.” He leaned forward. I smelled a hint of Old Spice.
“And then I’ll know who I should kill.”
Chapter Two
The Rookie
I never wanted to be a journalist. The word conjures images of sharp-featured men in fedoras holding spiral notepads, asking the new widow who just fled a burning house what it feels like to lose her husband and three children. I wanted to be a screenwriter, a Hollywood director. But I got tired of waiting tables at Rock Bottom Brewery in the Flats one day and figured I should try to make use of my Kent State English degree by writing freelance stories for local newspapers and magazines. At the time, Cleveland Scene magazine offered as much as $2,500 for a single article. That’s more than I made in two months at the brew pub.
Every Wednesday afternoon for two years I would pick up the latest issue of Scene and read it cover to cover. I studied the format. I taught myself the style of a couple of the best writers. I honed my craft and waited for a unique idea.
In November 2003, I submitted to Scene a profile of Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who lives a reclusive life in Chagrin Falls. Scene took a chance on it and me. That article led to more, and soon I was working as the magazine’s full-time mail sorter. When I was promoted to staff writer in December 2004, I needed stories to pitch. My first thought was Amy.
Many years had passed since her body was found in that Ashland County field. Although that fifth-grade class photo was still vivid in my mind, I had forgotten many of the details about her case. Wanting to refresh my memory before pitching the story, I contacted the Bay Village police department; thankfully, a detective agreed to meet with me.
Although my mother lived in Rocky River for a number of years and I had visited her on rotating weekends and summers throughout my teens, I never actually set foot in Bay Village until February 9, 2005. Turning off I-90 onto Crocker-Bassett, I felt an odd quiver in the pit of my stomach. It was a little like the fuzzy-headed feeling of déjà vu, that sense of being outside yourself, but not quite. I had experienced this once before, on a brief visit to Bangor, Maine. I spent that trip touring a number of sites resident author Stephen King described vividly in his novels. Actually walking across the Penobscot River on a stone bridge that was featured in It, I felt as if I had crossed into King’s imagination. It was the location where the evil clown’s first victim turned up. I remembered reading that passage in the fourth grade. By the time the police found the guy, a fish had eaten part of the man’s penis. I didn’t look over the edge to see if the clown was still there.
Driving into Bay Village I felt the same way. I had come to know the town in two-dimensional images when I was eleven years old—seeing it on newscasts, reading about the community in newspapers—but the story of Amy’s abduction remained removed from me, abstract, until this moment. I had been able to consider it the same way I could consider a particularly scary King novel: spooky, but safely separate from my reality. Now I could feel myself entering the story. I was becoming a character of my own, appearing for a brief cameo in Amy’s epilogue.
* * *
There are no rundown houses on the main roads leading into Bay Village. Mostly there are only two-story Cape Cods or Colonials, vinyl-sided with well-kept lawns. These are homes I associate with bankers and lawyers, but maybe that’s because I come from middle-class rural dirt roads where double-wides are the norm. To me, Bay Village looked like the towns featured in John Hughes movies—a Home Alone, Sixteen Candles kind of place.
At the corner of Lincoln and Bassett, I waited while a crossing guard led a gaggle of students across the street, kids born after Amy died. They probably knew her name vaguely as something invoked during sleepovers, words whispered into bathroom mirrors at thirty seconds before midnight. The middle-schoolers were dressed conservatively. I would be surprised if any understand what a hand-me-down is. There was not a single black child among them. Bay Village, unlike Lakewood and Rocky River, had not really integrated. I’m not saying it was a racist town. It merely hadn’t had the chance to find out where it stood on that issue yet.
Farther on, I turned right onto Wolf Road. Little Red Riding Hood came to mind. Amy, too, had met a wolf in human clothing somewhere near here, only she had not emerged unscathed from the beast’s belly. No heroic woodsman appeared at the last moment to cut her out.
Past Bay Middle School was the town center, then in the throes of a major construction project. The bridge on Wolf was open only to eastbound travelers. The police station was inside the town hall at the corner of Wolf and Dover Center. The town hall itself could have been set dressing from some Mark Twain tale. The large brick building with its steeply slanting roof was the oldest I’d seen in Bay Village, a reminder to the seventies architecture of the shopping plaza across the street that things were once beautiful. Lake Erie blended with the winter horizon on the other side of the baseball diamond behind the parking lot. I pulled into a visitor’s space and walked inside.
At the end of a hallway I reached a bulletproof glass window.
“I’m here to see Detective Lieutenant Mark Spaetzel,” I said to the uniformed cop behind the glass.
; I felt nervous then. In a moment, the lone detective still assigned to Amy’s case would step through that heavy metal door next to the glass partition and see me for the fraud I was. Some journalist. A kid, really. Still young enough for a trace of acne. Not tall. A small paunch above belted jeans. Dressed like a metrosexual on a budget. Carrying a battered leather satchel that screamed, Please, take me seriously. See, I’m a writer!
Trying to seem at ease, I bent over a display case filled with bongs and pipes confiscated from drug busts. I tried to look interested but not so interested that the cop behind the glass would think I was surveying goods. On a separate shelf was an open ledger—the officers’ logbook from the evening in 1954 that Doctor Sam Sheppard was charged with murdering his wife.
“Mr. Renner?”
Detective Spaetzel—that’s “Spet-zel,” like “pretzel”—held the door open. He was younger than I expected, the first hints of gray playing at his temples. Most of his hair was still jet black and cut short, parted smartly to one side. He had a welcoming smile and alert eyes, seemingly unjaded by the grim details of the case to which he has devoted his care.
I shook his outstretched hand.
“Come on inside,” he said. He ushered me into the narrow confines of the police department’s detective bureau, down a hall to his cramped office. “He did it, you know.”
“What?”
“Sam Sheppard. He killed his wife. We know that for sure.”
Sheppard was actually acquitted of the crime after a highly publicized retrial by Cuyahoga County’s best prosecutors in 1966. By then, he had already served ten years in prison, following an initial flawed conviction. Several books have been written on this case, each pointing to other men as the real murderer of Marilyn Sheppard. The Wrong Man implies that the Sheppards’ window washer, Richard Eberling, did it. Tailspin points the finger at a “bushy-haired” air force major. My own mother, who worked briefly in a Lakewood Hospital mental ward, claims she knows “the true story,” told to her by a patient one stormy night. I came to learn that people in Bay Village will ask a stranger “Who did it?” as a sort of litmus test. Any answer will do, but people get a little fussy if you don’t have any opinion at all. The case casts a shadow over Bay Village, and its residents don’t like their darkness ignored.
