Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  CHAPTER 3: THE MAN IN THE CRV

  Boyle, the Hunters’ across-the-street neighbor, was the first to notice the silver Honda CRV as it moved conspicuously up her street.

  She had just left the house around 3:20 p.m. to meet her son after school. Right in front of her, she saw the CRV herky-jerky starting and stopping as it went north up 54th, as if the driver was scouting for an address. When the vehicle paused in front of the Hunter home, the driver, a dark-haired man with olive skin, peered back at Boyle through his rear-view mirror. Just for a moment, their eyes met.

  It seemed to Boyle the man was spooked by that. Because he quickly started back up and followed the curve of the street to the right and out of sight. Boyle thought the driver’s behavior a little odd. She noted the car had some kind of unfamiliar out-of-state plate — white with pastel colors like pink or peach. But Boyle’s first thoughts of the man were benign. He must be checking out a home that’s soon coming on the market, she thought. This was the kind of street where houses often sold by word of mouth before a for-sale sign ever showed up in the yard.

  Other neighbors saw the same man after he drove the silver CRV around the corner and parked a couple blocks south down 53rd Street. The driver just sat there for a minute or so. Then he emerged into the broad daylight and started walking back up the street. The man was wearing a dark, oversized jacket over a white collared shirt and dark pants. He also had a dark canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder, as if on some kind of business. As would become apparent, he definitely was.

  Most who saw him that day recognized him as an outsider. For one neighbor, the giveaway was his ill-fitting suit, not like the tailored ones her husband wore. The darker tone of his skin also made him stand out in the nearly all-white neighborhood, the man later described to police variously as Hispanic or of Middle Eastern descent.

  Mary Rommelfanger was alerted to the stranger’s arrival in front of her house by her dog’s barks. The dutiful Charlie never failed to alert the family to ominous threats like a UPS package delivery or kids zipping by on skateboards. But Rommelfanger did become suspicious after watching the way this man lingered in his car. After he finally exited the vehicle, she even went upstairs to a second-story window just so she could track him as he walked north up 53rd. Soon, he disappeared from sight.

  Minutes later, when Rommelfanger left to pick up her daughter from school, she noted in her rear-view mirror that the CRV had no front license plate. She vowed to write down the number of the back plate when she returned. But she never did get that chance. Because by the time she and her daughter came home an hour later after an unscheduled stop for Slurpees prompted by the nice weather, the car was already gone.

  Paul Medin became the next neighbor to size up the stranger. Medin was walking to pick up his son from Dundee Elementary around 3:30 p.m. when he saw the man walk around the corner in front of him and turn on to 54th Street. The man stumbled — Medin thought it must have been a sidewalk crack, but there would be speculation years later that the man had been drinking. Then the stranger proceeded to the front door of the Hunter home.

  From the Hunters’ front porch, the man looked back directly at Medin a couple of times, sending off a creepy vibe. “I can’t explain this,” Medin would say years later. “But I had a bad feeling about what was happening.” Medin even made a point of noting the address number of this unfamiliar house, just in case he heard of something suspicious going on.

  The man must have knocked or rung, because after a while he appeared to be talking to someone through the storm door. It seemed to Medin the person who answered the door was a woman, but police would later speculate it was more likely the mop-haired Tom. As Medin walked on, he couldn’t help taking one last look back. The man was gone. Medin could only assume he’d been let inside.

  Some 10 minutes would pass. That’s when Swanson then saw the man leave the Hunter house and walk toward her as she supervised her kids’ play at the Pie. To her, the man was walking casually, not seeming in any hurry, not betraying the least bit of concern.

  As a protective mom — there was a reason she was out there with her traffic-calming, children-at-play signs — Swanson felt a bit uneasy seeing this stranger walk toward her kids. “He didn’t look like he belonged,” she’d later say. So she was relieved when he made a quick turn east on Davenport, back in the direction of his parked car, and strolled out of sight. Soon after, the CRV was gone, too.

  It would be hours before Swanson or anyone else learned of the wicked nature of this mystery man’s call in Dundee.

  * * *

  For Dr. William “Bill” Hunter, the first sign something was amiss was Shirlee’s car. As Hunter turned up his driveway around 5:45 p.m., he was surprised to see his house cleaner’s white Ford Taurus still parked by the back door. Shirlee must be running behind, he thought — not unheard of if she got a late start on her cleaning.

  After his long day at the office, Hunter was looking forward to spending the evening at home with Tom. Since wife Claire had flown off to a medical training conference in Hawaii, it would be up to Bill to throw dinner together and make sure Tom was ready for another school day.

  Hunter walked through the back door, set down his briefcase and reached his jacket toward the white coat rack in the corner. That’s when, with a start, he spotted Sherman.

  She was face down on the hardwood floor of the hallway. He saw the knife through her neck. Even in this surreal moment, he recognized it immediately as coming from the knife block in the kitchen. Hunter could also tell from the sheer volume of blood surrounding Shirlee that she was dead.

  As a practicing and teaching doctor of pathology — the medical specialty devoted to disease and how it impacts the human body — seeing a corpse was actually an everyday event for Hunter. At Creighton’s teaching hospital, the pathologist regularly supervised doctors-in-training who were conducting autopsies. To Hunter, death was natural, clinical and most often easily explained.

  But to now see the body of someone he knew sprawled in a bloody pool on the floor of his own home jarred Hunter to his core. And just as suddenly, a panicked thought sent his heart racing: Tom. Where’s Tom?

  Hunter could hear the soundtrack of his son’s Xbox game repeating on a loop in the basement, a sound he would describe years later as “that horrible music.” And the stairs that led down to the basement were just to the left of Sherman’s body. Hunter darted halfway down and quickly scanned the room. No Tom.

  Racing back up, his breath getting shorter with each step, he anxiously called out his son’s name. “Tom! Tom!” Hunter went through a sitting room in the rear of the home, again seeing nothing, and then into the living room. It was from there, looking across the front entryway into the adjoining formal dining room, that Hunter first laid eyes on his son.

  Tom was face down on the floor. He, too, had a knife sticking all the way through his neck. Hunter could also tell by all the blood soaking the elegant blue rug that his son was dead. Just to be sure, the doctor checked Tom’s cold wrist for a pulse.

  Hunter struggled to get his mind around what he was seeing. Is this real? He stepped around his son’s body and staggered over to the phone in the kitchen. He knew he needed help, but he couldn’t think who to call. He took a few deep breaths before dialing 9-1-1. And even then, the flabbergasted father struggled with what to say.

  “Do you need a rescue squad?” the emergency operator asked.

  “No, these two are deceased,” he replied, slipping into the clinical language of his work. “I need the police.”

  The operator told Hunter to leave the house immediately and sit on the front porch to await help. Hunter complied but couldn’t sit, quietly pacing back and forth. He was still unable to grasp the horror of what he’d just seen. Indeed, Hunter would long be haunted by the unimaginable images in his home that day. He would soon after undergo treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It
would take a year of therapy for him to cope with the nightmarish scene he’d witnessed.

  Those traumatic struggles would only be layered on top of the profound grief over losing Tom. To have his son so viciously stolen from his family was a heartbreak that would never, ever, go away.

  The neighborhood was soon swarming with Omaha cops and cruisers. They sealed off the Hunters’ street. They fanned out in the neighborhood, hearing for the first time about the mystery man who had so casually come and gone hours earlier.

  Rommelfanger gasped when she learned that one of her son’s best friends had been murdered right around the corner from her own home. She also knew immediately that the man she’d watched park out front hours earlier had been the culprit. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “I saw him!”

  To have a neighborhood kid and grandmother so brutally slain sent immediate shock waves through Dundee that reverberated all over Omaha. If this could happen in one of the city’s quietest, most affluent neighborhoods, was anyone truly safe?

  Omaha police officials attempted to tamp down the fear. A department spokesman the next morning offered few details on the nature of the deaths but said the killings appeared to be “an isolated incident.”

  But the truth was, at that moment, the Omaha police had no idea of the killer’s identity.

  CHAPTER 4: IN HIS BLOOD

  As detective Derek Mois worked with crime lab technicians that first night noting, marking, photographing and collecting any relevant evidence, the detective was already crafting his theories of what had happened in the Hunter home. He looked hard at the bodies, their positioning, the injuries. What were these voiceless victims telling him?

  Mois attempted to put himself in the footsteps of a killer.

  Tom almost certainly was killed first, Mois surmised. He had probably left his video game to respond to the man at the door. The killer then either talked or forced his way in, or maybe snuck in around the back after being rebuffed. When Shirlee was cleaning, Mois learned, the back door would typically be unlocked.

  The theory that Tom died first was supported by the fact that Mois found a substance around Tom’s mouth that had subsequently been smeared on the back of Shirlee’s bright blue blouse — what’s known in detective parlance as a “fluid transfer.”

  Shirlee was most likely cleaning upstairs when Tom was attacked. Mois found her vacuum still plugged into the wall in the master bedroom and her scrub brush in the bathtub. Shirlee may have come downstairs to drop off the cleaning supplies in the hall, or perhaps had come at the curious sound of Tom’s struggle. And then she found herself face-to-face with a vicious killer.

  It made complete sense that she would then attempt to flee down the hallway toward the back door. From her body position and injuries, Mois believed she’d been chased down from behind, pushed to the floor and then dispatched after a brief struggle.

  Mois was in his element as he pieced together the violent sequence of events. In his relatively brief stint in Omaha’s homicide unit, he’d already proven himself adept at reconstructing crimes, using his keen eye for detail and logical sense to pull it all together.

  A 34-year-old Minnesota native, Mois had moved to Omaha and joined its police force nine years earlier. He’d previously worked as a police officer in Washington state, in a mountain town so small he could sometimes work a 12-hour shift and not get a single call. Mois craved more action. But it wasn’t a macho thing with him. He truly felt a need to be part of something bigger, a chance to serve and make a difference in the world.

  Mois looked for police jobs all over the country before a friend recommended he apply in Omaha, a job that would ultimately bring him back to his Midwestern roots. His rookie photo coming out of the academy showed a fresh-faced cop with short dark hair, a sturdy jaw and piercing blue eyes. He looked like a man with big intentions.

  After more than four years as a street cop, Mois gravitated toward detective work. For two years he investigated car thieves, burglars and other sticky-fingered types. It was a little aggravating. Caseloads were high, with limited ability to focus on any one. And even when he’d make good busts, the perps usually did short stints in prison and then were right back in business. They were never going to change. That life was all they knew. “You do what you can,” he’d say of those years. “But it’s frustrating.”

  Still, Mois’ work soon caught the eye of the lieutenant who ran Omaha’s homicide squad. There had been a brutal theft case, a violent purse snatching in which the elderly victim suffered a broken hip and later died. Mois was able to find the offender and then pinned so many other crimes on him that he was locked up for a good long time. After that, the homicide lieutenant, Alex Hayes, started recruiting Mois to join his unit.

  Mois at first resisted. He knew homicide detectives in Omaha worked ungodly hours. He’d be on call 24/7. And as the new grunt of the unit, Mois knew he’d be called in on every weekend and late-night shooting — common events when summer arrived and the gang turf wars heated up. Since Mois was newly married and he and his wife were just starting a family, he turned Hayes down at least twice.

  But Hayes persisted. And in 2005 when the lieutenant had another opening, he sat Mois down. In homicide, you will be tested like nowhere else, Hayes told him. Everything you do is scrutinized to the Nth degree. The defense attorneys turn any misstep into an opening to get a killer off. It’s not a place for sloppy, half-assed police work. Challenge yourself. This is where you belong.

  “In that conversation, I wanted it all the sudden,” Mois would say years later. He signed on.

  Hayes and other veterans mentored Mois, schooling him on the myriad ways and means by which human beings kill each other. Hayes would often assign senior detectives to put Mois in their pocket for the day, show the rookie the ropes. Hayes would also test Mois and ask his opinion on cases, bluntly pointing out where Mois was wrong. The boss more than once told Mois his answer was “the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.” But Mois appreciated Hayes’ direct approach and leadership. He looked up to him.

  Mois found that the reality of being a homicide detective was every bit as challenging as he’d thought. His life became a never-ending cycle of drive-by shootings and other violent mayhem. He was racking up more than 600 hours of overtime a year, demands that were not real popular at home.

  But he took great satisfaction in putting away some of the most dangerous people in society, at times starting from nothing. He even liked taking the stand in court, a part of the job many colleagues loathed. Mois also loved the camaraderie in his unit, guys doing their best to keep things loose as they went about their serious, macabre work. It’s an attitude that would later be summed up by words emblazoned on the coffee mug of a colleague: “Homicide: Our day begins where yours ends.” At the same time, Mois continued to impress fellow detectives with his dedication and professionalism.

  Around Omaha’s detective bureau, the free-spirited Mois in many ways marched to his own drum. He was an atheist attracted to Buddhist philosophy who was mostly surrounded by conservative Christians. His simple, guiding philosophy to life was to judge others only by their actions and leave the world a better place.

  Mois also wasn’t keen on the department’s dress code. He’d string a tie around his neck only when a supervisor threatened to write him up. He had a collection of assorted ties and sport coats hanging on the wall above his desk, mostly gathering dust. He came to work most days in comfortable, non-regulation hiking boots. And the elaborate Buddhist- and Norse-themed tattoos that over time came to cover both of his muscular arms sometimes showed below his rolled-up shirtsleeves.

  But when it came to solving Omaha’s most violent crimes, Mois’ work was always by the book, meticulous and intensely thorough. Just three months earlier at Christmastime, a troubled teen walked into an Omaha department store with a high-powered assault rifle and senselessly snuffed out eight innocent souls before turning
the gun on himself. It was the deadliest mall shooting in U.S. history, adding Omaha to the long, sobering list of American cities jarred by mass shootings.

  In the aftermath, the methodical Mois — by then a two-year veteran of homicide — was hand-picked by his superiors to document the crime scene on the store’s third floor, where seven of the nine bodies lay. His peers knew he would do things by the numbers and get everything right.

  Mois also stood out for the way he passionately poured himself into his cases — a drive that was motivated, he’d say, by his empathy for the families shattered by murder.

  Investigating homicides often meant spending much time with the families of the victims as he tried to discern who had motive to kill them. Mois would almost inevitably form a bond with those grieving families, coming to take their losses personally.

  “They want answers, and the only people they can turn to is us,” he’d later say. “You can’t do what we do and not get affected by the families. It’s just not possible.” Mois would always keep a snowflake Christmas ornament on his desk, a meaningful keepsake given to him by one of the families devastated by the department store massacre.

  Not only did Mois feel a personal obligation to solve his cases, but the cool, self-possessed cop was also confident that he could. As he now worked the bloody scene in the Hunter home, Mois wanted nothing more than to be able to say to the Hunter and Waite families that the person who stole away Tom and Shirlee was now in jail.

  While Mois’ affinity for crime scenes was one reason he worked the Hunter house now, the assignment was mostly a matter of happenstance. The bodies had been found a couple hours after Mois began his 3 p.m. evening shift that day. As this complex, baffling case would unfold in months and years to come, this would be just the first of several remarkable instances where Mois just happened to be the man in the right place.