Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  Mois had teamed up with Warner in the past. But the more he worked with him on Dundee, the more he came to appreciate him. Warner had a reassuring presence about him and clearly knew his stuff. Mois was also delighted to see that inside that starched collar, Warner also had a sense of humor, a clownish side that came out more and more as the detectives worked together. It really wasn’t as odd a pairing as it had seemed. They clicked.

  Around their desks in homicide, Warner and Mois would spend hours discussing the case. What was most important? What needs more scrutiny? They looked for loose threads and grabbed hold of them. “It occupied our lives every day,” Mois would later say. “And when I say every day, I mean every day.”

  A particular focus of Mois during late 2008 came to be whether Tom could have been the victim of some kind of internet predator. Omaha detectives had seized all the Hunters’ electronic devices in the wake of the killings. After sifting through them with the help of the FBI, they saw Tom had been interacting with dozens of people online, both in chat rooms and through online gaming on his Xbox.

  Most of these people only appeared as obscure screen names like “iiiifireiiii” or “pockypowah.” Through subpoenas sent to Microsoft and website operators, Mois dug deeper. He wanted to learn who the anonymous people were behind the screen names and whether they could have ever had direct contact with Tom. In the end, Mois would literally track these people all over the country and around the globe — as far away as Iraq.

  In looking at Tom’s online interactions, Mois and other detectives did find some communications that concerned them. Tom had been frequenting a chat room on a popular educational website for pre-teen kids called Whyville. He was sending and receiving messages in this chat room under his screen name “kupcakek.” In fact, the night before he died, Tom had been on the site.

  As Mois found, things in Whyville weren’t always as they seemed. He learned after tracking down a young girl who had befriended Tom on the site that he had represented himself to her as a 17-year-old roughneck, a tough kid who got into fights and had bad grades. But more concerning to Mois was evidence that there were others interacting on the site who were much older than they represented themselves to be. That included at least one college student that Tom had both chatted with on Whyville and played video games with.

  Why would a college student be frequenting a website intended for pre-teen kids? And while this college kid was playing video games nearly every day, why did the records Mois obtained show he was curiously offline in the days around the Dundee killings? Mois wanted to learn more.

  As the only full-time Dundee investigator, Warner worked lots of different angles. Many times he’d wake at home at 3 a.m. and be struck by an idea. Sometimes he’d follow a lead and get excited for a while, but then days later dismiss it in the face of new evidence. Warner, though, in the end came to particularly focus on one man who for years would be seen as the prime suspect in the Dundee killings.

  Just days after the murders, Hunter had sat down at Creighton with Dr. Brumback, the chair of the department, and another senior department administrator. Together they went down a list of every resident who had gone through the Creighton pathology program since the 1990s — dozens of names. Name by name, they talked about all of them. While they dismissed most immediately, there came to be much discussion about one: a Russian doctor who not long before had conflicts with several people in the pathology department.

  During his three years at Creighton from 2004 to 2007, the Russian had been variously seen by people in the department as intimidating, odd and creepy. One female staff member felt he had violated her personal space when they stood together. Brumback didn’t like the Russian. Brumback had insisted, against Hunter’s wishes, that Hunter put him on review and order him to undergo a psychological evaluation. In response, the Russian filed an employment discrimination complaint against the school. What had seemed to Hunter a minor incident had turned into a major fiasco for the department.

  Hunter eventually defused the situation. He even helped the Russian land a good job in Pittsburgh that more fit his interests. The Russian seemed generally pleased with how it all worked out, so much so he agreed to drop his complaint against the school.

  Given all that, Hunter saw no reason that the Russian would have a beef with him.

  But the department’s senior administrator, and to a lesser degree Brumback, thought during the meeting that day that the Russian might still hold a grudge against the school. Rumors circulated around Creighton that he even had connections to the Russian mafia. There was also discussion that the Russian looked somewhat like the police sketch. Talk of the Russian heated up even more, Hunter would recall, when police detectives arrived in the midst of the meeting at Creighton that day.

  The detectives seemed interested in the Russian doctor, too. And that was affirmed days later when a group of four detectives came to Hunter’s home. That was the same day the Hunters gave their short list of potential suspects to the detectives. In addition to discussing the handful of names the Hunters had listed, the detectives asked many questions about the Russian.

  However, when those initial investigators looked into the Russian’s background, he seemed to have an alibi. At the time of the killings, he worked in the county coroner’s office in Pittsburgh. Records there suggested he was on the job that March day.

  Still, Omaha detectives remained skeptical. It wasn’t as if the Russian punched a time clock each day. And though he had performed an autopsy the day prior to the killings, he wasn’t part of any on March 13. Could he have made his way to Omaha? It seemed there may have been a small window there.

  As the new lead investigator, Warner would give the Russian a long, second look.

  Warner re-interviewed some Creighton officials and also spoke with new ones. He further probed the employment records in Pittsburgh. And when he felt the time was right, he became the first Omaha detective to confront the Russian face-to-face.

  By then, the Russian had left Pittsburgh to take a coroner’s job in Calgary, Canada. So traveling with an FBI agent, Warner flew north of the border. It wasn’t common for Warner to hop a plane as part of his work. Trying to protect his curious 5-year-old daughter from the gruesome nature of this business trip, Warner told her he was flying off in pursuit of a donut robber. For a long time afterwards, she asked him if they ever caught the guy who stole all those powdered donuts.

  Memorably, Warner and the FBI agent landed in Calgary amid a massive snowstorm. To top it off, the airline lost their luggage. So the next day, dressed in the same clothes they’d worn the day before, the investigators dropped in at the Russian’s office.

  They arrived unannounced. Warner wanted to read the Russian’s face and body language when they flashed their badges. And Warner didn’t want to give him any opportunity to rehearse answers.

  The Russian was clearly surprised but also cordial, agreeing to sit down. Warner spent several hours patiently walking the Russian through his time at Creighton, his relationships with everyone there, and the nature of his departure from the school. He asked about the Russian’s discrimination complaint, whether he ever had a conflict with Hunter, whether he’d ever met Hunter’s son. Warner already knew the answers to nearly all the questions he was asking. He wanted to see if the Russian slipped.

  By the end, Warner still wasn’t completely convinced there was no way the Russian could have been in Omaha on March 13, 2008. But as he boarded the plane to return to Nebraska, Warner’s gut told him the Russian just had no motive to harm Dr. Hunter or his child.

  Exhaust a lead. Move on to the next best one. That was the life of a homicide investigator. Warner thought of where he would turn next. But Warner soon learned this was actually the end of the line in Dundee for both he and Mois. Their bosses decided Dundee had essentially gone cold. And that was underscored when in early 2009 the Omaha police leadership administratively transferred
the case to the department’s cold case unit.

  Mois understood the decision. He knew that cold case, with some of the department’s top detectives specifically dedicated to dormant cases, would be able to put resources behind Dundee. But at the same time, he was frustrated by his superiors’ call.

  He felt Dundee detectives from the start had been too often side-tracked by bureaucratic meddling, asked to chase the latest random tip down some rabbit hole. Mois recalled the time a caller suggested there was someone at a mall who looked like the man in the sketch. Mois was told to drop what he was doing to canvass the mall — in his mind a complete and maddening waste of time.

  Mois also didn’t agree that the case had gone cold. He and Warner still had not run out of leads. Mois was still exploring the background of the college kid who had been interacting with Tom online. He hadn’t even gotten to the point of interviewing him yet. “I’m not done,” Mois said.

  What gnawed at Mois most was the simple fact they had not been able to crack this case. Both he and Warner felt badly they’d been unable to bring some peace to the Hunter and Waite families. “I don’t care who solves it,” Warner said. “I just want it solved.”

  Still grieving their losses, the world turned a little more slowly for the Hunter and Waite families. March 13, 2009 — the one-year anniversary of the Dundee killings — passed without an arrest. Friends and neighbors of the Hunters marked the anniversary with a solemn candlelight vigil around the Hunters’ front porch. Both families despaired that the case would never be solved. “It is just killing us as a family, not knowing who or why,” Bill Hunter told an Omaha World-Herald reporter. “Obviously, we are desperately seeking closure.”

  While Dundee was now housed in the cold case unit, police officials publicly emphasized that didn’t mean it was going into cold storage. The unit had been created by the department the year before specifically to work on these types of high-profile, unsolved cases. And Lt. Ken Kanger, the hard-driving cop who headed the unit, was bound and determined to solve Dundee.

  In the months and years to come, Kanger would have his detectives pore through the files and re-interview past witnesses. They had the Hunters again consider anyone at Creighton who could have done it. Detectives visited Tom’s friends as they grew up and matured, just to see if they had held anything back. And the detectives continued to go through old tips. While the unit also worked other cases, Dundee never sat on a shelf. Rarely did a week or month go by without the unit chasing down something.

  Cold case eventually did interview the college kid on Whyville that Mois was so interested in. He, too, was cleared. The online predator theory also became a major theme when the case was featured in a 2012 episode of the “America’s Most Wanted” TV show. Omaha police cooperated with the producers, still looking for that elusive tip that could blow the case wide open.

  Cold case also continued to dig into the Russian, finally finding what appeared to be an ironclad alibi for him. Computer records they obtained through a search warrant showed an email had been sent from his desk in Pittsburgh just hours before the Omaha murders.

  As the time passed, Shirlee’s family grew increasingly frustrated. They were bothered by the turnover of detectives on the case. And to Shirlee’s family, resorting to a TV show proved police were lost and totally grasping.

  But the Waites also didn’t easily give up. Not only did the family contribute significantly to the reward fund, they also spent $20,000 for a private detective to do his own probing around the case. The private eye particularly looked hard at Creighton connections, which the Waite family had become convinced were the key to the murders. Their investigator also became much interested in the Russian, not at all convinced he was in the clear. But try as he might, the private eye couldn’t place the Russian in Omaha, either.

  Time marched on. By the end of 2012 — nearly five years after the Dundee slayings — the Omaha police files on the case filled seven 4-inch binders, a stack of paper some two feet high. All that work. All that effort. And yet Omaha detectives were still no closer to identifying the mysterious man in the silver SUV, the ruthless killer who so brazenly walked Dundee’s quiet streets that day.

  The difficulty in solving Dundee had been particularly underscored late in 2008. That’s when the FBI’s behavioral science unit had come out with its insights into the case. To make sure detectives weren’t missing anything, Mois about two months into the Dundee investigation had engaged with the famed FBI behavioral unit, based in Quantico, Virginia.

  The FBI ran details of the case through a computer database that looked for similar crimes committed around the country. It was hoped the unusual nature of the knives left in the necks would point to a related crime elsewhere. An FBI official also flew out from Washington to get more details and to personally walk the crime scene.

  The psychological profile that the agency produced in the end didn’t offer the magical insight Mois had been hoping for. It wasn’t anything like what you see on TV, where such a report would suggest the killer was a 28-year-old white male who lives in his mom’s basement and likes cats. The conclusions were far more general.

  There was at least one intriguing suggestion in the FBI profile: that the culprit was a serial-killing drifter. The prospect they were dealing with a serial killer certainly had not been lost on the Omaha detectives. Mois, though, also knew that suggestion and $5 would get you a Starbucks latte. It didn’t really bring detectives any closer to the killer.

  But in the end, the FBI profile would prove prophetic in another way. It suggested police would likely not find him until he killed again.

  CHAPTER 7: MOTHER’S DAY

  Just past daybreak, Mother’s Day 2013, Mary Brumback awoke to a pleasant surprise.

  Son Owen Brumback was on early-morning dad duty with his daughter, Savannah. And the 6-month-old was sleepless in suburban Denver.

  So Owen — the tall, thin, blonde-haired son of Dr. Roger and Mary Brumback — dialed up his mom in Omaha. He loved calling his mom — and did so several times a week, just to chat. “I like to talk; she likes to talk,” Owen would later say. “I just wanted to keep her company. I liked talking to her.”

  Owen decided to turn this Mother’s Day into Grandmother’s Day. He told his mom to switch over to FaceTime so she and Roger could see their granddaughter in all her gum-toothed glory.

  Savannah smiled and cooed and drooled and did all the cute things that a 6-month-old does. Sitting in front of their iPad, the Brumbacks beamed. A week before, they had been to Denver to visit Owen and wife Chrissy and see Savannah’s baptism. It was a near-perfect, extended weekend with family. But on Mother’s Day, this FaceTime call would prove short-lived. After Savannah got squirmy, Owen wished Mom a Happy Mother’s Day and hung up.

  With that kick start, the Brumbacks went about their Sunday. All around the house on this beautiful May 12 in Omaha were signs of a couple on the verge of their next adventure: retirement. An empty hutch, its drawers barren. Computers, aligned and unplugged. Boxes packed, marked and stacked. The couple, both 65, had decided to move to West Virginia, where both would be closer to relatives. So several weeks before, Roger had announced he would leave his workplace of the past 12-plus years — the pathology department at Creighton medical school.

  Brumback, a native of Pittsburgh, had started his four-decade medical career in 1967. A brilliant young prodigy, at age 19 he became the youngest student in the very first class of Penn State’s new medical school in Hershey, Pennsylvania. After a distinguished academic and medical career that saw him lead Creighton’s pathology department for a decade, write or edit 14 books, pen another 130 journal articles, launch and edit two medical journals, and even discover a monkey species, Roger had decided to retire. Sort of.

  He had taken an administrative post at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, a college in Lewisburg, West Virginia that focuses on natural healing. Evidence
-based alternative healing had piqued Brumback’s interest late in his life. The rest of his career had been devoted to child neurology and pathology, including his long-time research into Alzheimer’s.

  Also, during this so-called retirement, the “certifiable workaholic” — as one friend described him — planned to continue to edit his two journals, one in child neurology and the other in alternative medicine. “I think Roger’s idea of retirement was cutting back from 70 hours a week to 50,” a friend, Dr. E. Steve Roach, said. “Roger was one of those rare people who was very nice to people, very, very smart and worked very hard.”

  The same could be said for Mary Brumback. A pleasant woman with a wisp of white hair, Mary became a pharmacist after graduating from Penn State. But she soon chose to go to law school. She later pursued a career in family law while Roger practiced and taught at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in Norman. The couple, who met in college, wrote a book on dietary fiber and weight control, and Mary helped Roger launch and edit the Journal of Child Neurology.

  When Roger took over Creighton’s pathology department in 2001, Mary gave up the legal world, channeling her detail-oriented mind into other pursuits. She worked at a hospital gift shop and also volunteered through a philanthropic educational organization at Creighton.

  Mary also ran the Brumback house. A prolific communicator, she talked to her sons, Daryl and Owen, all the time. She also spoke daily to her mother or her caregivers at her nursing home, dutifully keeping a journal documenting these talks and her mother’s care. “Told her I went to service league luncheon at Donna Foley’s and got our mower back,” she’d written two days earlier. “She seemed fine mentally — not agitated, not confused.”