Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  McInnis called out, “This is private property. You can’t go through there.”

  Hearing that, the man slammed down the lid of the Dumpster and said, “I know what’s good for you. I’ll slit your fucking throat.”

  McInnis got away from the window and called the cops. She described the man as five-ten, thirty-five years old, wearing olive green pants and a blue nylon jacket. He had brown hair and she said she could identify him if she saw him again. The man was last seen walking east on First Street. Police searched but found no one matching the description.

  Detectives Carter and Steiner continued canvassing Palm Avenue for potential witnesses. Cheryl Gilbert, who worked at Chasen Reed, on the corner of Main Street and South Palm, said she last saw the victim at around noon on Friday. Gilbert was on her way to the bank and waved at Wishart through her shop window. Robert Wilson, of Wilson Galleries on South Palm, said he knew who the victim was, but he had never had any dealings with her. He had a manager, he said, who knew Wishart, but that guy quit two weeks earlier, saying he found the job too stressful. Doug Carpenter and Morris Apple, proprietors of Apple-Carpenter Gallery on South Palm, said they knew the victim well. Carpenter and Wishart had worked together recently on a Palm Avenue brochure. They agreed she was a nice lady, but they knew nothing of her friends or associates. Werner Meier, of Design Impressions, said he didn’t know the victim, but his wife might have.

  Mary Bates, of the Palm Avenue Gallery, knew Wishart to be thoughtful and helpful. Bates kept her promise to call the police when she saw anything suspicious; from then on, every transient who looked in her store window was reported. One of those drifting window-shoppers was a fellow named Mark, who, when contacted by cops, reported a couple more transients whom he thought suspicious. Cynthia Retz, of Gallery 53, said she knew nothing, but she asked if it was true what people were saying about what was done to the victim. And on and on, it went.

  A witness named Nikki Meyer spoke to Detective Mark Opitz on January 24, saying that she was a friend of Wishart’s and had had dinner with her on several occasions. Wishart had confided in Meyer that there was one particularly valuable work of art in the Provenance, which she did not keep displayed.

  “It was a Renoir etching of a ballet dancer,” Meyer said. “She kept it in a zippered folder.” Wishart said the etching was worth up to $12,000. Meyer didn’t know if Wishart had a customer interested in the Renoir.

  Meyer told Opitz she was optimistic that police would be able to find out if there were customers interested in the etching because “Joyce was compulsive about logging everything in on her computer.”

  “Did Ms. Wishart ever express anxiety about being in her gallery alone?”

  “Not at all. On the contrary, Joyce felt very secure in her gallery.”

  Meyer knew nothing of Wishart’s romantic life. She’d seen her with men, but some of them were gay.

  The following day, Sunday, January 25, Officer Stanley Beishline was patrolling Sarasota’s Gillespie Park section—which included a portion of Palm Avenue—when he was approached by a homeless couple in their thirties. They identified themselves as Dennis and Ann Collins and explained they had information regarding possible suspects in a recent homicide. Dennis told the officer that there were four white males who hung out near U.S. 41 and Main Street, two blocks south of the crime scene.

  “They are very violent when they’ve been drinking, and I haven’t seen any of them since Thursday,” Dennis Collins explained, speaking about January 22, not January 15.

  “If you got a victim over there who has been stomped on with boots, then these are the guys you are looking for,” he added. When those guys drank, they beat up people and robbed other homeless people. The leader was a white male by the name of Chris. He was very violent, the most violent of the bunch, and he carried a large folding knife, about six inches long, with serration on the back. Chris had a fat wife and two kids, but the kids were taken away from them before Christmas. Cops caught the whole family sleeping together in the cemetery, and that was why they took the kids away. It made Chris mean. He’d been kicked out of most of the places where homeless people could go for help—Resurrection House and the Salvation Army, to name two—and was desperate. Dennis said he bet there were people at the Resurrection House and Salvation Army who knew Chris’s last name.

  “What about the other guys in this group?” Officer Beishline inquired.

  “The second guy is named Mike, but they call him ‘Salamander,’” Dennis said. Mike was responsible for robbing a homeless man named Robin and smashing in his face.

  There were two other guys, but Dennis didn’t know their names. One was blond, had a moustache; the other had freckles all over his body.

  “If I need to get in contact with you two, how do I do it?” Officer Beishline asked.

  The Collinses said they could be contacted at the Resurrection House, or on the second floor of the library. That was where they spent most of their time.

  Beishline followed this report up with a few phone calls, but he could come up with no further information on Chris, Mike, and the two other thugs.

  That Sunday, Officer Cliff Cespedes recontacted the security guard he’d seen lurking in the shadows. He wasn’t willing to let that go until he had some more information. He asked Stephen Garfield for his vital statistics, height, weight, hair and eye color.

  Garfield said that during his shift he jiggled the doorknob to the Provenance Gallery each time he passed. That was part of his job. He’d done that every day from January 16 to January 21; he had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. He wouldn’t have been able to tell if there was an odor coming from the Provenance because he had a head cold and couldn’t smell anything.

  The only thing unusual about that stretch of time was that Garfield was training a new security guard, taking the rookie on his rounds with him, showing him what to do.

  He remembered that maybe eight months before there had been a false alarm at the Provenance, the alarm went off for no apparent reason, and he had talked to the responding officers. He had no recollection of ever being inside the gallery. (The false alarm actually happened two years earlier. Officer Cespedes subsequently found a report dating back to 2002 regarding the Provenance’s security system’s false alarm. The system had been inspected, and Wishart’s motion detector was replaced. Wishart was fined by the Sarasota Police Department for having a faulty motion detector. She was told she’d been in noncompliance with a city ordinance. This ticked Wishart off, and she officially requested that the fine be excused. Red tape was sticky and it wasn’t until the summer of 2003 that the SPD Support Services Division decided to excuse the malfunction for this incident only. However, the incident would still count toward possible future “multiple malfunctions” penalties.)

  Cespedes asked Garfield, “What’s your address?”

  Garfield gave the address of the Bay Plaza, where he worked.

  Cespedes said, “No, home address.”

  Garfield, at that point, became vague. Only after repeated probing and follow-up questions did the officer ascertain that Garfield lived with a friend on Garden Road in Venice. Garfield said he didn’t remember the street number.

  “You don’t know your own address?”

  “I’m only going to be staying there for two more days and then I’m moving into a Howard Johnson’s.”

  Although it was like pulling teeth, the officer finally induced Garfield to spit out the whole story. Until recently he did have a permanent address in Venice, but he had been asked to leave because of marital woes. His wife of five years, in fact, had taken out a temporary restraining order against him.

  “Why did she do that?”

  “She’s afraid of me.”

  The restraining order, he admitted, dated back to a December 29, 2003, incident in which Garfield’s wife called the sheriff’s department on him, claiming he had barricaded himself in the bedroom with four firearms. Deputies had to come and remove him from the home.


  Garfield said that the women of the house had ganged up on him. His seventeen-year-old stepdaughter also claimed that he abused her physically. She, too, called the sheriff’s department on him, but none of it was true. He was afraid of losing his job if any of these domestic troubles became public knowledge.

  Cespedes looked into Garfield’s claims and discovered that he had largely told the truth, although he had not been completely forthcoming regarding the ongoing nature of the conflict between the Garfields. Cespedes learned that five times in December and five times again in January sheriff’s deputies had to come to the Garfield home because of family disturbances. Only recently, Mrs. Agnes Garfield (pseudonym) reported, her husband pounded nine beers before noon and then set his mind on getting his wife and her daughter arrested.

  Agnes Garfield, a nurse by profession, informed police that her husband, the bum, had made a living for several months making jewelry and then selling it at art shows and flea markets. Her father-in-law was an FBI agent or a Treasury Department officer or something like that. A Fed. Agnes called Detective Opitz many times during the investigation. Every time she recalled a bit more dirt on her husband, she phoned it in without hesitation.

  Garfield told Cespedes that years earlier he himself had been a cop, five years with a small-town police department in Ohio. Under persistent questioning from law enforcement, Garfield admitted he worked in the morgue and had grown comfortable around dead bodies, even decomposing bodies.

  “Why’d you leave the force?”

  “Got hurt. Car accident.”

  Detectives did some fact-checking. Opitz verified the Ohio law enforcement story. Cespedes checked Garfield’s criminal history and he came back clear on all searches. Opitz verified that Garfield had served two years as a security specialist in the air force, stationed in Washington, D.C., and San Antonio, Texas, as he claimed.

  Stephen Garfield remained a person of interest until February 3, when SPD crime scene technicians determined that his fingerprints didn’t match those found in the Provenance.

  Also on that Sunday, January 25, Walter Megura went to Joyce Wishart’s home on Wagon Wheel Circle. Also there were Detective Sergeant Norman Reilly and Detective Jim Glover. Criminalist Megura took digital photographs of the house, inside and out. The place was very neat and orderly. A fingerprint from a plastic cup found in the front office of the house was processed. A computer in the den was seized. Also found in the den was a copy of Wishart’s will, prepared by attorney Johnson Savary, of Dunlap & Moran. In the garage was a Honda auto registered to Wishart’s son Jamie, who, just back from Europe, had visited over Christmas. A search of the master bedroom uncovered no items of interest. Ditto for the small bedroom, which contained items belonging to Jamie Wishart.

  While there, Glover was approached by a neighbor and friend of Wishart’s named Sue Sweeney. Before Wishart became ill with cancer, they had been tennis buddies. Sweeney said she thought Wishart had two boyfriends, both from somewhere in the Midwest. She last saw Wishart on Tuesday, January 13, when she stopped into the Provenance to visit.

  “Nothing seemed to be bothering her,” Sweeney said. Joyce was very upbeat and positive. Her daughter Patty was there, but she did not partake in the conversation. “Who would want to hurt Joyce?” Sweeney wondered.

  Later that day Detectives Jim Glover and Carmen Woods interviewed Thomas Kearney, who’d been a coworker of Wishart’s at the Asolo Repertory Theatre. After she left the Asolo, he helped her build the website for her art gallery. They’d had a falling-out when she became “very demanding” regarding his time. He had not spoken to her in over a year.

  Captain Laracey and Sergeant Reilly separately interviewed Patty and Jamie Wishart, who had flown in from the home the siblings shared in San Jose, California. Patty was thirty-two years old, distraught, and said she’d just recently visited her mother, from January 8 to January 13. She flew out of Tampa International Airport on Delta Airlines. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was bothering her mom.

  Her mother and father were divorced in 1982 and hadn’t had any contact since the early 1990s. Recently her mother had hired a private investigator to find her ex-husband. Patty thought her dad had been found in Dayton, Ohio, but she wasn’t sure and had no address for him.

  “I haven’t spoken to my father since I was in tenth grade,” Patty said. Basically what she remembered about him was that he was drunk and abusive. “He used to tell me about abusing cats when he was a kid.”

  Patty said her father was the only person she could think of capable of killing her mother. There hadn’t been one incident in particular that led her to that conclusion, just a pattern of abuse. “My dad had a hunting rifle above the fireplace. Mom would freak out when a domestic argument occurred.”

  The two Wishart kids who didn’t talk to their mother (or their father) were Kirsten and Scott. Joyce and Kirsten had a falling-out because the mother didn’t like Kirsten’s husband. Similarly, Joyce had a falling-out with Scott after he married Becky.

  Patty said her mom had a couple of boyfriends back in Columbus, but she didn’t think she’d had any contact with them since she moved to Florida.

  She explained that the Wishart children had been born in two sets of two. Kirsten and Scott were older, born close together; then she and Jamie came later, also practically back-to-back. Glover asked why the older siblings were estranged from their mother, and Patty, not eager to discuss familial woes, said she wasn’t certain.

  Police interviewed Jamie Wishart next. He was born November 3, 1973, and gave his address as the same as his sister Patty’s. He had also been to visit his mother recently, staying in her spare bedroom from December 17, 2003, until January 7, 2004. He visited his mom immediately after returning from Italy.

  Jamie said his mom and dad were divorced when he was only eight or nine and he hadn’t spoken to his dad in fifteen years. According to Jamie, his mom didn’t talk to his oldest two siblings because they had insisted on maintaining contact with their dad, which his mom took as a personal betrayal. He remembered how violent his mom and dad’s marriage had been, that mom had once been hospitalized because of the abuse she suffered. Jamie was of the opinion that on that occasion his father would have killed his mother if his older brother, Scott, had not intervened.

  Where was Dad? Ohio. Mom had Jamie hire a private detective to find him. Jamie said that was for Social Security purposes. She wanted to claim wages that Robert earned during the time they were married to bolster her Social Security income and retirement.

  When the interviews of the victim’s children were complete, Patty and Jamie accompanied Detective Glover to their mother’s home. Glover asked them to walk through the house with him and see if anything looked out of the ordinary.

  Patty said “someone must have entered” the home since she was there last. A framed photograph of her mother had been placed in the den. That was new. The photo showed Joyce Wishart standing with a guy in a chicken costume. Numerous documents, not there before, were now resting on the couch in the den. Nothing else was touched. The matter was investigated briefly. The items were probably moved during a previous police search. Glover came to the quick conclusion that whatever had happened, it had nothing to do with the murder.

  Patty told Glover that her mom was having business trouble. According to the daughter, the Provenance’s financial health was even worse than Joyce had admitted to her friends. The gallery wasn’t making money. The lease was up in June. She planned to sell or just close up. She’d already submitted three job applications at local businesses.

  “Did your mother carry large sums of cash on her person?” Glover asked.

  “No,” Patty replied. “Fifty, sixty dollars. Rare she would have more.”

  “Did she wear jewelry?”

  “Nothing fancy.”

  When music played at the Provenance, it was usually classical. Her mom liked that vibe for the gallery.

  “Your mother carry any life insurance?” Glover
asked.

  “I don’t know,” Patty replied.

  Jamie Wishart supplied the name of the investigator who’d found his dad. The guy was a friend of his from back in Ohio, named David Hayes. Sergeant Philip DeNiro gave Hayes a call.

  The private eye told DeNiro he and Jamie Wishart were old friends. Back in the day they’d even dated the same girl. Hayes said that during the summer of 2003, Jamie had wanted him to find his deadbeat dad, who owed child support.

  Joyce’s kids had made it clear that the investigation had nothing to do with child support; it merely had to do with Social Security, but DeNiro let it slide.

  Hayes did find Robert Wishart, and he gave the son an address and phone number in Dayton. Hayes never made physical contact with the dad, but he did call him. Hayes told DeNiro that the man who answered the phone became nervous and stammered that he’d never heard of Robert Wishart.

  DeNiro called Dayton police and learned that Robert Wishart did not have a criminal record. He was clean—with the exception of a parking ticket in 1993. Ohio DMV supplied DeNiro with Robert’s photo, but it was faxed and the quality was not very good.

  DeNiro called the landlady at the address he’d been given for Robert Wishart. She didn’t have anyone living there under that name. Not legally, anyway.

  “There is a squatter named Bob,” she said, and he turned out to be Wishart. Bob lived with a woman named Rose. He worked at the Salvation Army in Dayton.

  The landlady said she didn’t peg Bob as a violent guy, just a ne’er-do-well. He drove a truck, gambled his money, and spent his winnings on alcohol.