A sergeant with the Dayton police agreed to interview Bob Wishart at the Salvation Army and get back to DeNiro. That was done. Bob turned out to be old and frail—and he had an alibi. He was in Dayton at the time of the murder, many miles from Sarasota and his ex-wife.
On January 26, a sixty-three-year-old freelance photographer asked permission to photograph the gallery. He was granted permission to take pictures of the gallery’s exterior only.
That same morning, criminalists were back inside applying luminol to the alcove walls and ceiling area, without success. Luminol was then applied to the carpet; this search bore fruit. Blood droplets were discovered in a line from the alcove to the bathroom. When the blood-revealing chemical was applied to the hallway louver, and bathroom doors, blood was revealed at both locations—blood spots that had been wiped clean, no longer visible to the naked eye. This was more evidence that the killer took his time after the murder, operated on the corpse, attempted a cleanup, staged the scene to give it style and maximize the shock value. The CSIs went to work at nine in the morning and were out by ten-thirty.
Meanwhile, criminalists Jackie Scogin and Valerie Howard were in the sally port, where they were giving the victim’s car a more thorough exam. Howard lifted one fingerprint from the passenger-side visor mirror. Only two prints were found in total on and in the car; neither was of comparative value.
Officer Harry Ross was guarding the crime scene on January 27 when he was contacted by a white female who would identify herself only as Rusty. She said that back on January 23, she saw a suspicious person near Main Street and Palm Avenue. It was a black male—and not the usual vagrant who frequented that area. This was someone she hadn’t seen before. Rusty asked to be contacted by an investigator and left her phone number.
Luminol and photography had been the criminalists’ last tasks. Following a last once-over by Detectives Anthony DeFrancisco and Frank Puder, the crime scene was released. At eight-twenty at night, Tom Shanafelt cleared the scene and the SPD’s twenty-four-hour presence at the gallery was discontinued.
Just in case the killer returned to the scene of the crime, a police surveillance camera and recording device were set up inside the gallery, looking out the front window.
After five days the surveillance experiment was discontinued. The camera and recording device were removed from the front of the gallery.
The resulting footage picked up a few curiosity seekers, and a regular visit from the Bay Plaza security guard on duty, but nothing helpful.
In the meantime Detective Jack Carter examined the victim’s daily planner, but he found little of value. The January 30, 2004, entry on her daily planner had Angels and Demons written above the word “Library.” This was no doubt a reference to returning the Dan Brown book by that title, and not a reference to any real-life cult-type activities.
More promising was Detective Opitz’s interview with Mary Jane DeGenero, the president of the Bay Plaza Association. She said that she and her husband were having coffee at the coffee shop at the corner of Palm and Main, when they encountered a fifty-nine-year-old artist named Thomas Monaghan, who said he was a good friend of Wishart’s. Monaghan was quickly located and explained that Wishart had sold three of his paintings, and she owed him money. (That got the investigators’ attention. Did debt equal motive?) He said that he still had a few pieces for sale at Wishart’s gallery. There was a vase to the left when a patron first walked in, a wooden block with a fishing village on it. He’d last seen Wishart on either Thursday or Friday, meaning the day before or the day of the murder.
Opitz asked if Monaghan had any history of mental illness. Monaghan said it wasn’t his favorite thing to talk about, but at one time he’d had depression and drinking issues. He hadn’t had a drink in twenty-two years, he quickly added.
After talking to the victim’s closest friends, they learned that Wishart kept a Sony camera at her gallery to take digital photos of the artwork. No such camera was found. The camera needed to be charged by a Sony power cord. To download photos from the camera into a computer, a USB cord would be necessary. Detective Opitz contacted five local camera shops to see if anyone had purchased, ordered, or inquired about any of these items. One camera store worker said there was a guy who came in asking about a digital camera. He was shown a photo of Thomas Monaghan. The guy said he looked familiar, but he couldn’t be 100 percent certain.
Police tailed Monaghan for a time and learned that he had recently been evicted from his apartment, where he still kept some of his belongings in storage. Without a home he had been sleeping on the front porch of his old apartment house. His car was at Upman’s Towing. Monaghan signed a waiver allowing cops to search his stuff. A polygraph exam was administered on January 29 by Jim O’Connor, of O’Connor Polygraph. During the pretest interview, Monaghan was asked what he thought had happened to Wishart. He replied that he thought “someone walked in off the street who is a psychopath.” Monaghan passed the polygraph and the shadow was discontinued.
The January 6 entry in the victim’s daily planner mentioned Greg Parry and the posters Wishart wanted for her upcoming show. Of potential interest were written mentions of someone who Wishart hired to set up her website, but whom she’d eventually had to fire. No name was mentioned, however, but police recognized this as a reference to Thomas Kearney. Among Wishart’s computer records was an e-mail from her son Jamie that informed her of the whereabouts of her ex-husband in Dayton, Ohio.
Detective Carter received a tip from Doug Carpenter, of Apple-Carpenter Gallery. He’d talked to a woman named Joyce Whidden, who said she, in turn, knew a man named George Danford (pseudonym), who “was infatuated with Joyce” and “Joyce thought he was scary.”
Detective Opitz spoke to Misty Whitley, who said that about a year before, a homeless man had come into her art gallery. When Whitley told him the place was closed, he became belligerent and at one point grabbed her. She threw him out of the gallery and hit him with a broom. The guy was about forty-five years old, white, with sandy blond hair. The last she saw he was departing the scene on a bicycle.
This “Bike Man” may have reappeared in the vicinity of Amy Shepherd, who said that she knew of a man—blond, forty years old, thin—who approached women on the street. This was on Main Street, only a few blocks from the murder scene. The guy would flatter a woman and try to hold her hand. He was persistent, but she’d never seen him angry.
“He rides a bike and honks his horn at people,” Shepherd explained.
On January 30, SPD criminalists submitted a variety of crime scene items to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Crime Lab. The idea was to find fingerprints that had been left on surfaces upon which fingerprints are difficult to find: paper, the victim’s left shoe, eyeglasses, cut pieces of the telephone cord, and envelopes taped to the back of framed art. The criminalists submitted with the package the partial set of prints that had been taken of the victim at the autopsy. The FDLE had some positive results. Two fingerprints with comparison value were found on the taped envelope. A palm print was found on Werner Pfeiffer’s artist profile card.
No other usable prints were found. The fingerprints on the envelope matched those of the victim, but the others didn’t—which might have been because they were made by someone else, or just that the victim’s comparison prints made at autopsy were of poor value due to skin decomposition.
The SPD also submitted a piece of carpet from the crime scene and two rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film containing images of the carpet. The FDLE found images of shoe prints in the photographs that were suitable for comparison purposes. Now they just needed shoes to compare them with. The FDLE kept copies of the photos and returned the negatives to the SPD.
Detective DeFrancisco delivered a subpoena to the Selby Public Library for the library records for a list of sixteen individuals, including George Danford and Greg Parry. The library search was unsuccessful. None of the persons of interest had withdrawn any books considered significan
t by investigators.
The nervousness lingered. The public remained jumpy. Imaginations took off, untethered. The mundane became sinister. Hookers reported johns with unusual tastes. Transients looking for a place to sleep, irate artists who felt their work hadn’t been properly displayed, anyone who left town around the time of the murder, became homicidal maniacs. Investigators continued to hear a wide variety of theories.
One woman reported seeing a young man on Palm Avenue. Asked what was suspicious about him, she said he was exiting one of the Provenance’s neighbor galleries while carrying a skateboard.
A woman named Linda Bailey reported that twice, once a couple of months before, and once on January 28, a thin black man, whom she believed to be homeless, barged into the rear office of Louise’s Paperie on Main Street, where she worked, and asked to be hired to wash the front windows. The first time she didn’t think anything of it, but the second time she thought, Well, that’s just the sort of thing that might have happened to Joyce. Because of that, she reported it. Bailey was unable to give a more precise description.
Folks around the vicinity of the United Methodist Church, which was on Pineapple Avenue, complained about a tall, thin white male who was aggressively panhandling, doing his best to intimidate those who wouldn’t give him money. No one knew if he arrived at the church on a bicycle.
The owners of Jack’s Restaurant, located on Main Street, complained that on January 21, a week earlier, someone had broken in at night through the ceiling, but they didn’t take anything.
On January 29, Detective DeFrancisco interviewed a woman who thought she was being stalked. Her name was Rita Cullanane (pseudonym). The guy was a white male, thirty-five to forty years old, with “blond short, shaggy hair.”
“How do you know he’s stalking you?” DeFrancisco inquired.
“He parks his car across the street and sits there staring at my house,” Cullanane replied.
The guy drove a gray Reliant K. He always left before she could confront him. Now someone was calling her phone and not saying anything. Just heavy breathing. She saw the same guy park in front of her house another time—only, he was in a different car, a green Lincoln, which might have been a taxi.
Forty-five-year-old Elizabeth Whittington, of Omega Lane, came to the SPD’s front desk to tell them that on a Thursday, during the first week of December 2003, about five weeks before the murder, she’d been invited by her friend Jo Ellen Silberstein to attend the opening of her show at the Provenance. “I met her at the dog park I go to. She told me that it was going to be a very big VIP event, with over seven hundred invitations going out.” In reality, however, there were only about ten people attending Silberstein’s “retrospective” of some thirty years of work. The small attendance made Whittington feel most uncomfortable. She left quickly and, after spending a brief time in a nearby gallery, went home. After that, Silberstein became “persistent and insisted” that they “get together for meals.” As they dined together, Silberstein told Whittington that she was from a prominent Sarasota family, that her mother was very big in the city’s ballet and circus. The family also owned homes in New York State. Whittington was clearly frightened by the murder, and there was a chance her imagination had gotten the better of her. Situations that might have been mildly irritating before the murder were now terrifying. She complained that since the murder she’d had “very odd people coming into” her life—a fact that had her so freaked out that she was not staying in her own home.
Silberstein herself was interviewed and also remembered the occasion. Instead of focusing on the poor turnout, Silberstein focused on a helper Wishart had around. It was a man named Jim, who carried paintings from one place to another and things like that. Jim gave Silberstein the creeps. She didn’t know why, but she thought it was something the police should know.
Silberstein knew something was wrong over the weekend. Wishart’s gallery was either open or the CLOSED sign was up. But that weekend she wasn’t there, and yet the sign was not up. She said of Wishart’s four kids, Joyce only spoke to two; the others hadn’t even called her when she was sick. Her ex-husband had been abusive and once injured her foot so severely that she required several surgeries.
Sergeant DeNiro talked to Gloria Owens, who was also familiar with Jim. “I felt uncomfortable around him, too,” Owens said. “He was very strange. I can’t put my finger on it. I just had the feeling that he wasn’t right.”
Jim turned out to be Jim Arthur (pseudonym), a retired airlines employee originally from Illinois, who had been the weekend box office manager at the Asolo Theatre when Wishart worked there. Arthur had had a key to the Provenance for a time when Wishart was ill, but he returned it a long time ago.
A woman named Andrea Briggs told police that she’d found a homemade doll just down the street from the Provenance, and she didn’t know if there was voodoo going on or what, but she thought it might be important. The doll, police noted, had no face and wore an acorn for a hat. It was spooky.
A private detective called SPD to report a hunch that had him troubled. He knew of a ne’er-do-well with the first name of Cloud, who had a history of taking things that didn’t belong to him and forging checks. Cloud claimed to be a Native American. The interesting thing, though, was that he was a regular at art shows, where he tried to sell knives he had made, with blades ranging from one to ten inches in length. “Some of them were very odd-looking,” the private eye reported. “They looked more like scalpels to me.”
Some 911 callers didn’t even have a concrete occurrence or sighting to report. “I just have a funny feeling I’m being followed,” one woman complained to the emergency dispatcher. “Especially when I’m downtown,” she added.
Sometimes the caller interested cops more than the complaint. A man called to say he “knew something” about the murder. A background check on the caller revealed that he had an arrest record for false imprisonment and selling porn to kids. He just wanted to get “inside” the investigation because he’d heard there was kinkiness involved.
Chapter 7
Carlie
The community’s fear and shock were compounded when, only two weeks after Wishart’s murder, an eleven-year-old local girl, Carlie Brucia, was abducted and murdered in Sarasota.
Carlie was walking home from a friend’s house in broad daylight on February 1, 2004, and was abducted by a man in a car. She was raped and strangled to death. Her body was dumped in the woods on the grounds of the Central Church of Christ, hidden with tree branches, two and a half miles from the site of her abduction.
The body was not discovered for four days; by the time of its discovery, it was partially decomposed and eaten by insects and animals. Dr. Vega, who performed Joyce Wishart’s autopsy, was also the medical examiner for the Carlie Brucia case.
The case broke when it was discovered that Carlie’s abduction was caught on video by a camera mounted on the rear of Evie’s Car Wash, on Bee Ridge Road, in southwest Sarasota, exactly five miles southeast of the Provenance Gallery.
The abductor’s family members identified him, and police arrested Joseph P. Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old auto mechanic. Wishing and praying, police looked at Smith as the possible killer of Joyce Wishart. There was disappointment when they found he wasn’t the guy. They also investigated Smith as a possible perp for the abduction of twelve-year-old Jennifer Renee Odom, who disappeared in Pasco County in 1993. Again, no connection.
Smith was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. No prior connection between abductor and victim was found. Carlie was apparently a random victim.
At the time of Carlie’s murder, reporters sought to create sensational headlines, and so used details from Dr. Vega’s autopsy report to draw parallels between this crime and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
Those similarities included the fact that both victims were strangled with thin string ligatures. Circumferential abrasions on the necks of both victims were horizontal, with just a slight upward devi
ation on the back.
Both victims had had their hands bound together. Both had bruises and abrasions in addition to ligature marks. No semen was found on the body in either case. In both instances a tiny spot containing male DNA was found on their clothing.
Dr. Vega noted that the ligature had been applied from the back, due to the slight upward slant in the back. Great strength would not have been necessary to complete the murder, as only about eleven pounds of pulling pressure on the ligature would have been necessary. Dr. Vega said the victim was killed by the ligature’s compression of the carotid arteries on each side of the neck.
The prosecution got its conviction when the spot of DNA material on Carlie’s shirt turned out to be Smith’s semen, and fibers found on Carlie’s shirt matched those found in the station wagon Smith had borrowed on the night following Carlie’s abduction. Strands of Carlie’s hair were also found in the car.
Although the ligature used to strangle Carlie was never found, Dr. Vega felt strongly that a shoelace had been used.
Testifying at the trial, Smith’s brother said that Smith had confessed to him to having “rough sex” with the victim.
According to the coroner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Cyril Wecht, pedophiles have been known to use “erotic strangulation” during the abuse of little girls, as it causes mild convulsions and seizures that, to the pedophile, resemble sexual climax.
The dark clouds over Sarasota hovered for months. It wasn’t until the summer approached and the weather got very hot that some of the sadness left.
“Hotter’n hell,” folks kvetched—this small talk seemed so normal compared to the thoughts they’d been forced to think for the past few months.
By the time of Carlie Brucia’s murder, DNA experiments were already being conducted on blood foreign to the victim found at the Joyce Wishart crime scene—and though no match for the DNA had yet been found, there were a few conclusions that could be drawn.
Evil Season Page 7
