EVIL SEASON
MICHAEL BENSON
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Prologue
PART I - THE GROTESQUE AESTHETIC
Chapter 1 - Discovery
Chapter 2 - Death and Violins
Chapter 3 - Autopsy
Chapter 4 - Sarasota Nerves
Chapter 5 - Joyce
Chapter 6 - “Bike Man” and Other Suspicious Characters
Chapter 7 - Carlie
PART II - ELTON BRUTUS MURPHY
Chapter 8 - The Orange Groves
Chapter 9 - Eco-Adventures
Chapter 10 - Bermuda
Chapter 11 - Mary
Chapter 12 - The Madness
Chapter 13 - Paula
Chapter 14 - C-section
Chapter 15 - Group Sex
Chapter 16 - Psychological Haze
Chapter 17 - Jane
Chapter 18 - New Home, New Life
Chapter 19 - Best Year Ever
Chapter 20 - A Not-So-Beautiful Mind
Chapter 21 - An Apology and Clarification
Chapter 22 - Return of the Military Flashlights
Chapter 23 - The Voices
Chapter 24 - The Talla Villas Nocturnal Playground
Chapter 25 - Haven of Rest
Chapter 26 - The Majik Man
Chapter 27 - Messages from Nibiru
Chapter 28 - Hypnotism
Chapter 29 - Shade Avenue
Chapter 30 - To Rape and Kill
Chapter 31 - Pornographic Rapture
Chapter 32 - Flight
Chapter 33 - The Dentist’s Office
PART III - JUSTICE
Chapter 34 - Good Old-Fashioned Police Work—Building a Case
Chapter 35 - Brutus Talks to the Police
Chapter 36 - The Nine-Inch Gash
Chapter 37 - The Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy Speaks
Chapter 38 - Arend Goes for It
Chapter 39 - Trial
Chapter 40 - Cannibal Killers and Art World Murders
Afterword: A God Has Become Man
Postscript
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the following persons and organizations for their assistance during the writing of this book: Michelle Andersen; Assistant State Attorneys Lon Arend, Karen Fraivillig, and Suzanne O’Donnell; production editor Robin Cook; Marcia Corbino; Gary Crowell, former employee of the Starlight Park Barber Shop; the Honorable Deno G. Economou; my agent, Jake Elwell, Stephanie Finnegan, Harold Ober Associates; Deputy Thomas M. Gilliland, Harris County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office; super editor Gary Goldstein; Kay Kipling; Jeffrey C. Monk, Administrative Manager, Houston Police Department; Reedy Photoprocess, especially president Stan Reedy and longtime employees Paula Burfield and Lynn Bushner; JoAnn Smolen, at the Lynn N. Silvertooth Judicial Center; Sally A. Trout; Margaret Wood; Stanley Beishline, Sergeant Curt Holmes, Cynthia Maszak, Cheri Potts, and Sharon Wood, at the Sarasota Police Department.
And Elton Brutus Murphy.
Author’s Note
Although this is a true story, some names will be changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be noted upon their first usage.
When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard the words.
In places there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that, in reality, only occurred in written form.
Prologue
Now that the “clay” for his sculpture was more cooperative, he went to work on it. He shaped it so that it was to his liking—a nude. Nudes were his favorite. His artistic forte was the grotesque aesthetic, forcing people to see beauty even in the ghastly. It was hard to pull off. Some of the surrealists had been good at it. Salvador Dalí! Man Ray! How about the Black Dahlia Avenger, now there was a surrealist artist!
They said that a sculptor could see the statue inside the block of marble, and he liked to believe he had that ability. He would make his feminine sculpture on its back, legs open, arms positioned as gestures. The sculpture’s hand pointed to an article in a nearby magazine on the floor. A clue, perhaps. The head, to one side, would be almost severed from the body, but not quite. Cloth would be draped, as beautiful as he could drape it, over her limbs, careful not to obscure the part where viewers would first want to look. The artist knew where they were going to look.
With his sharp tool he cut and dug, cut and dug, and removed from the piece a large chunk, a key chunk, which he put in a plastic bag. When people first gazed upon his masterwork, their eyes would go first to that void he’d created.
Setting was important. He would place his piece among other pieces of art, more conventional artwork, so that the difference in impact between his and others’ work was more dramatic.
All of this thinking was just more evidence of how special he was. Of course, he was a great artist. How could he not be? He was the Homo superior, a cross between man and God—not just a spiritual man, but a man with a spiritual following. So it didn’t shock him that when he was done and his artwork was ready for public viewing, he hardly had any blood on him at all, and washing up was a snap.
Time to make the stew.
PART I
THE GROTESQUE AESTHETIC
Chapter 1
Discovery
Sarasota County, Florida: a beautiful little section of Florida, but one with pretensions. Nothing sinister, of course, just a community that enjoyed casting itself as artsy. There was opera. Ballet. And a strip of art galleries on one of downtown Sarasota’s main drags, North Palm Avenue.
More accurately, Sarasota considered itself still artsy. There was no argument that this had once been the case. Back in the day—historically—Sarasota had an artsy vibe oozing from its pores.
But that was before suburban sprawl turned much of Sarasota County into a world of McDonald’s franchises and Kmart stores, largely indistinguishable from anywhere else in the United States.
Just how artsy Sarasota really was these days could be argued, but the important thing was that art and culture were important facets of Sarasota’s self-image.
Members of Sarasota society distinguished their world from that of the riffraff, which was why it hit the town where it lived when the horribly carved body of Joyce A. Wishart was found on Wednesday, January 21, 2004, on the floor of her Palm Avenue art shop, the toney Provenance Gallery, a storefront at the base of the Bay Plaza Apartments.
James Jay McClelland had been a maintenance man at the Bay Plaza Apartments for four years. When there was a mess, he was the guy who had to clean it up.
At about eleven o’clock that Wednesday morning, McClelland received a phone call from Peter Delisser, one of the co-owners of Sage Capital Investments, a storefront space at the base of the Palm Avenue building.
“There’s a foul smell coming from somewhere,” Delisser complained.
He’d first noticed it on Tuesday. He didn’t know if the smell was around before that. There had been a long weekend because of Martin Luther King Day and the stores downstairs had been closed on Monday.
Delisser explained, “I have smelled this sort of smell before. It usually has to do wit
h the sewer system. Wherever it’s coming from, they should run the water in all of their faucets for ten minutes. That worked for me.”
McClelland said he would investigate, and he did. The odor was strongest when standing outside the front door of the Provenance Gallery, the space immediately south of Sage Capital. It didn’t smell like garbage or the sewer to him. It was the pure horrible smell of putrefaction.
He informed Nancy Hall, the Bay Plaza condominium manager, of the situation. Deborah Anderson, the Bay Plaza concierge, tried to contact the Provenance’s owner, Joyce Wishart. She didn’t get an answer and left a voice message: If Joyce didn’t call back soon, someone was going to enter her gallery to check on the odor.
Hall told McClelland to get a key to the Provenance at the Bay Plaza’s front desk. He would also need the alarm code. At one o’clock, after almost two hours of dread, he asked Anderson for the key and security code. The keys for all of the spaces in the building were kept in a file cabinet, which itself required a key.
McClelland told himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. Once, when he first started working at the Bay Plaza, there’d been a similar odor. It turned out to be a rat that died in the ductwork. That was probably what it was this time, too.
At 1:18 P.M., he used a key to open the Provenance’s front door; the odor was now overpowering. He immediately entered the four-digit code to turn off the alarm.
He expected silence, but instead heard classical music from the store’s sound system—the soothing Muzak of a generic string quartet.
“Mrs. Wishart? Mrs. Wishart! Anybody home?”
McClelland took small tentative steps toward the back of the gallery. He glanced to his left into an alcove, briefly looked at the bloated gray-green body on the floor, and—without touching anything, his heart pounding from his chest and nausea churning in his stomach—he ran back outside, and didn’t stop running until he got to Hall’s office.
“Dead . . . dead body,” McClelland panted.
Hall called 911 at 1:20 P.M.
Chapter 2
Death and Violins
The first responders, police officers and firefighters, were practically blasted backward by the smell. Veterans will tell you, you never get used to it.
They noted the classical music. Death and violins. That was different.
Detective Anthony DeFrancisco, of the Sarasota Police Department (SPD), observed possible blood on the front door’s interior dead bolt handle and on paper, which was taped to the interior side of the front glass window, next to the door. He also noticed possible blood on the cover to the alarm panel, to the right of the front door.
It wasn’t a large space, with more depth than width. There was the gallery itself, where approximately two hundred works of art, both paintings and objets on consignment, were displayed.
In the back, where there was privacy from those who might look in through the front window, paintings were stacked up, or rested on the floor leaning against the wall. All the way back, there was an office and a storage room.
There was no back door.
It was a crime scene no one would forget—no matter how hard they tried. The body—an older woman, with red hair—was posed supine and obscenely spread-eagled. The body was stretched out on a carpet in an alcove, out of view from the street, on the north side of the building.
Her head was lying in the direction of the northwest corner. The alcove contained artwork both hanging on the walls and lying on the floor. The body, discolored and bloated from decomposition, had one arm stretched outward, and the left leg was partially covered with her clothing, which had been cut asunder.
Immediately visible were multiple stab wounds to the chest, and a slash wound at the throat all the way down to the bone. It looked as if the killer might have tried to behead his victim.
The most disturbing part wasn’t what was there, but rather what was not. The victim’s vagina and lower abdomen had been surgically removed. There was just a large raw hole between her legs, a grisly negative space almost impossible for even the toughest professionals to gaze upon.
But Detective DeFrancisco had to look. It was his job to see it all. The victim was an older white woman, approximately five-eight in height. Weight was more difficult to estimate because of the decomposition bloating.
The legs had been spread far apart, pointing eastward, toward the front of the store, demanding attention be given to her gaping crotch wound. In addition to the large throat wound and the many stab wounds in the woman’s exposed breast area, he also noticed defensive wounds to both of her hands. Her forehead, shoulders, and back were also deeply cut.
The detective thought it was going to be impossible to tell if she’d been sexually assaulted. Of course, he meant in a conventional sense—rape. There was one small blessing, however. The crotch surgery appeared to have been postmortem.
A person who had been opened up like this, neck slit, would have bled out. Blood would have been in a large pool on the body. Instead, he noted, “The body had very little blood on the skin and around the injuries.” It appeared the killer wiped the body clean.
DeFrancisco did however see blood and body fluids around and underneath the body. Plus, he could see, the victim’s clothing was soaked with blood.
There was no blood spatter on the upper walls or ceiling of the alcove.
The victim had been wearing a green pantsuit. There was a green-and-brown scarf around her neck, a white shirt, white bra, white panties, tan panty hose, and bronze-colored shoes with gold trim. The shoes rested symmetrically, toes facing the victim’s opened crotch. To stand in those empty shoes would be to hover over that horrible void. The scarf had been damaged in the attack. It had slits in it.
The victim’s hands and bare feet were purple. Her suit top and shirt were pulled up above her chest. Her bra, panties, and panty hose had been cut away, and were partially lying beneath the body. On her left wrist the victim was wearing a watch mounted on a brown leather strap. Her other jewelry was a pair of earrings. Her clothing had been cut by a bladed instrument. The clothing wrapped around her lower left leg turned out to be her pants.
There were indications that the killer had played in his victim’s blood. In some cases the artwork was stained by what appeared to be a combination of blood and bits of flesh. In some cases there was wiping across the spatter as if a halfhearted attempt to clean up had been made. Or, perhaps, the killer just wanted to “finger paint.” The killer had lingered at the scene after the murder. Not only had surgery been performed, but there was blood in many places, indicating the killer had wandered around after the murder.
In the rear of the business were two bathrooms, a shower stall filled with boxes, a refrigerator, and a microwave.
On the floor in front of the refrigerator, DeFrancisco found a brown leather purse and a black nylon bag containing miscellaneous items. Someone had gone through their contents. The key to the gallery’s front door was in the purse. Items were dumped out.
In the southwest bathroom there was an area of watered-down blood on the floor, near the door, in and around the sink, and on a plastic OPEN sign that was lying on the floor in the corner near the toilet.
The watery blood on the tiled bathroom floor had been smeared with an artistic, if not infantile, playfulness. Again, it appeared as if the killer had been painting—perhaps using his toe as his brush—in blood on the bathroom floor.
Otherwise, items in the room looked neat and orderly. There were no bloody items in the garbage can. The northwest bathroom, it seemed, was used mostly for storage, and contained a ladder and cleaning supplies. There were also some personal-care items in the sink.
The scene was so obviously organized that details, which might have been considered irrelevant at the scene of another murder, were carefully scrutinized here.
One of the pieces of art most spattered was a serigraph, hot stamp, embossed on black Arches paper, called New York, New York. The work was signed in all caps ERTE, the
nom d’art of Romain de Tirtoff.
The work was part of the artist’s 1987 “New York/ Monaco Suite.” It was 28½ inches by 23½ inches inside a 45-by-38 frame. The price was $7,500.
That piece of art rested on the floor and leaned against the wall, right behind the victim’s head. Her red hair was touching the glass near the bottom of the frame.
The glass front was pushed in—perhaps by the killer, perhaps during a struggle—and was speckled with blood and hair. The killer had intended for this work to be viewed as the scene’s backdrop.
The pushed-in glass had blood smudging. Above it, below the spot where it had been hanging on the wall, there was blood running down to the floor. Perhaps, the detective thought, the victim initially fell into this picture, striking her head against the glass.
A second picture, called Eighteen Degrees, had also been knocked off the wall hanger and was lying on the floor in the same corner. There was blood running down the front of the picture frame and glass.
Nearby, on the floor, were a variety of items: a pair of blood-spattered eyeglasses and a Provenance Gallery news release from November of the previous year, announcing an exhibition of animal dolls by artist Linda Salomon.
The wall had scrape marks on it, some of which may have come from the falling picture. In that same area there were gouges and slice marks on the wall, which also looked as if they’d been made by a bladed instrument.
A key part of the scene was a bloodstained copy of the November 2003 issue of Sarasota Magazine. The body was posed, face turned to the left, left arm placed outward, hand resting atop the magazine, seemingly gesturing toward the magazine, which was opened to an article called “A Fine Madness, True Tales from the Days When Sarasota Was an Artists’ Colony.” The article described Sarasota in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when it grew from being a Gulf Coast fishing village into a small city with an affluent-yet-beatnik eccentric ambiance.
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