Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  With his tour of galleries complete, Murphy retreated to a small tavern only a half block from the coffee shop/bookstore.

  “I was there for maybe an hour and a quarter. I had a cheeseburger and french fries, three beers, and a scotch on the rocks,” Murphy remembered. He was feeling better, but still not good enough to murder.

  He skipped out on the bill, easy to do as they were changing shifts, and walked to another bar on the next block. He had two more beers.

  After his second beer, the bartender asked him to leave. Murphy didn’t remember the specifics, just that he was feeling pretty good, half wasted, and said something the bartender found offensive. It could have been anything.

  It was going on five in the afternoon and Murphy was ready to return to the gallery. He concluded that closing time was the best for making his move. If his gods were with him, maybe no customers would show up. He waited until the appropriate moment and entered the gallery.

  The woman was in the back again, and Murphy took the opportunity to flip the flipper on the front door’s lock. The door could no longer be opened from the outside. He flipped the flipper, using only the sides of his fingers so as not to leave identifiable prints.

  He walked to the back of the gallery, anonymous. The woman was almost in the perfect position, just outside the desirable alcove. If he could get her to move just three feet into the alcove, they would be invisible to outsiders.

  “I’m back!” Murphy called out. “I came to buy the painting.”

  “Great,” the woman replied. She stepped into the alcove to retrieve the nude of the blond woman.

  Murphy followed her in. He had his backpack over his left shoulder, with the zipper partially open for easy access to his combat knife. The woman smiled as she lifted the painting and held it up for her customer to see.

  He didn’t even like that painting. It just seemed like a painting that a guy might like if he wasn’t part God. He thought the painting was amateurish. He didn’t like any of the paintings in the entire gallery.

  But she believed he loved the painting, and that was all that mattered. The ploy worked perfectly. “She fell for it . . . literally,” Murphy recalled.

  Later he would suppose that there must have been classical music playing, since the music was playing when the body was found, but he didn’t remember hearing it. He only remembered the sounds the woman made.

  Murphy pulled the knife out of his backpack. He stepped forward and held the knife in the woman’s face. Her smile was replaced by a taut grimace of terror.

  He could see the panic in her eyes.

  Chapter 31

  Pornographic Rapture

  “Do as I say or I will kill you,” Murphy said. “Drop the painting to your right.”

  She did as she was told. He pushed her back and shoulder blades into the gallery wall. They were now in the perfect position, invisible to the outside world.

  “I held the knife to her throat. I didn’t say a word as my left hand first found her left breast and then her right,” Murphy recalled. He thought how good those breasts felt, even through her clothing.

  Years later, Murphy still lapsed into a pornographic rapture as he recalled the details of the sex attack, how he forced a hand inside her pants and vaginally penetrated her with a middle finger. He liked the feeling that gave him.

  He withdrew, removed his hand, and grabbed her by her right arm. With the knife still to her throat, he directed her to move forward a few feet away from the wall.

  Murphy reached inside his backpack with his left hand and removed a long men’s stretch sock.

  “Put your arms behind your back!” Murphy said, using his command voice.

  She complied and he attempted to tie her wrists together with the sock.

  “You can’t do this,” the woman complained. “It hurts my shoulders.”

  For some reason that statement made Murphy extremely angry. He cursed her. A voice in his head said, “Kill her!”

  “Without a second of hesitation I lifted the knife away from her throat, stepped to her left side, and drove the knife very deep into her back between her shoulder blades.” He pulled the knife out and then stabbed her again, just as deeply, very close to the first wound.

  She began screaming loudly, so he threw her once again into the wall, where she hit her back. He must’ve tried to stifle her screams with his hand; because the next thing he knew, she was biting down hard on a knuckle on his left hand, drawing blood. He already had a cut on that finger from a haircutting incident a few days earlier; the old wound opened, along with the new, until he was bleeding pretty good—spilling key evidence onto the scene.

  The bite to his knucklebone made Murphy berserk with rage. He stabbed the woman repeatedly on the top of her head. He put her up against the wall again and let go, so that she slid downward. He continued the attack, with her on the floor.

  “I knew that she had to give up her soul,” Murphy commented.

  He had an “overwhelming sense of immortality and exhilaration.” Never before in his entire life had he felt that way. (And never would he again.)

  He saw her eyes go vacant. He grabbed her by the feet and adjusted her, so that she was just right on the floor.

  “Well done,” said the voices in his head. “Now rape her! Rape her!”

  He pulled off her shoes; as he did so, he noticed that his finger was still bleeding. In the bathroom he washed the blood from his hands.

  There was a fax machine on a desk in another of the alcoves. He used his combat knife to cut the cord so there would be no interruptions.

  He returned to the woman, grabbed her pants legs and pulled down her pants. He removed them. He retrieved scissors from his barbering tools, which he had in his backpack, and used them, expertly snipping away like the professional cutter that he was, opening up the woman’s shirt and bra.

  “Her breasts were nice and shapely, among the best I’ve ever seen,” Murphy commented.

  He used the scissors to cut off her panty hose.

  He remembered that sex lesson from so many years before, when he lost his virginity on a picnic table at the Fisheating Creek Campground.

  You can’t do it with the panties just pulled down. They have to come all the way off.

  He pulled her legs open until they formed a right angle on the floor. Murphy gazed happily at her “womanly place.”

  The woman’s voice in his head said, “You have conquered her. Now you can do whatever you like to her. Go ahead. Taste her!”

  He did.

  “Rape her!” the voices said. He pulled down his own pants and he tried, but “my body wouldn’t cooperate.” He shouldn’t have had those last two beers. There was a time when he could drink all night and still get the job done with a woman, but age had taken its toll.

  He had just managed to get his pants back up, when the voices in his head let him know how unhappy they were. He wasn’t through with the woman yet.

  “Cut off her head! Cut off her head!” the voices echoed urgently.

  He tried to comply, and again he failed. He cut at the neck, deeper, deeper, until he hit the spine. Then his knife would go no farther. His knife was sharp as a razor, too, but not a match for bone. Her head wasn’t going to come off. He gave up.

  “Cut her between her legs,” the voices commanded. “Cut it out and take it with you.”

  Murphy went to the very back of the gallery and found a plastic bag.

  “I returned to the woman and I removed a pizza pie–shaped section of her womanhood and placed it into the plastic bag,” Murphy recalled.

  Police would later put forth the theory that the body was posed. That it was supposed to represent a work of art, that there had been an attempt to make the body resemble a framed piece that was nearby. He laughed every time he heard that.

  “The police have been reading too many crime novels,” Murphy theorized.

  Police would one day say that he purposefully placed her hand so that it was indicating a
copy of Sarasota Magazine, to an article called “A Fine Madness.” Murphy would like us to believe that was another coincidence, or perhaps the mad part of his brain operating without the sane part realizing it. (He insists that he wished he had done it on purpose, because the article’s title magnificently described his state of mind on January 16, 2004.)

  If it was art, and Murphy was willing to consider the possibility, so be it. It wasn’t him creating it. There was this and other reasons to believe Murphy’s gods were overseeing these events. How else to explain one physical improbability?

  “Throughout the stabbing and the cutting of the woman, not once did I get any of her blood on me anywhere, not on my hands, not on my clothes,” Murphy said.

  Was it a miracle? Murphy said he didn’t believe in luck. “Let’s just say I was fortunate.”

  He put the plastic bag containing the woman’s flesh into his backpack. He found the woman’s purse and dumped out its contents. The only money she had was in her wallet, and there wasn’t much. Maybe $50 in all.

  “I looked at her driver’s license and that was the first I knew her name, Joyce Wishart. Now I had a name for the woman I had been so intimate with.”

  He swiped her wallet and an expensive digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. The wallet and camera went into his backpack. Murphy claimed he took the victim’s keys, which had spilled from her purse, but police reports seemed to indicate he left the keys behind. Perhaps the victim had her office keys and her car keys on separate chains.

  For reasons he didn’t understand, Murphy grabbed the OPEN/CLOSED sign that went on the front door and he ripped it, and threw it onto the bathroom floor. He unlocked the front door from the inside, making sure that no one was coming, and stepped outside. He went through the woman’s keys until he found the one for the front door; then he locked up.

  He put the keys in his pocket and walked casually across the street to his bicycle. He unlocked it and rode away. He was surprised to learn that he’d only been inside the gallery for about a half hour.

  He took Cocoanut Avenue north to Fruitville Road, took another right and rode all the way to Shade Avenue. In twenty minutes he was home.

  Murphy put the bagged wedge of vagina flesh in a second plastic bag; then he put the whole bundle in the rooming house’s freezer. He planned on keeping the flesh as a souvenir.

  Then, with disappointment, he realized it wasn’t going to work. Someone had been stealing food from him out of the refrigerator, and a communal freezer might not be the safest place for his treasure.

  He removed the bag from the freezer. It wasn’t as messy as you might think. Murphy said there was no blood on it.

  “It was just like a fish fillet,” he said. “A flat piece of flesh.”

  Using a pair of his barber scissors, he cut the flesh into small pieces. “I did it in my room, over a paper plate and a piece of paper towel,” he explained.

  When he was done, he took everything—plate, towel, and chunks of flesh—into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, the same toilet that his landlady had been bending over when he goosed her.

  In his room he cut up the contents of Joyce Wishart’s wallet, cut all of her credit cards, cut her driver’s license, cut up the wallet itself.

  He went for a ride on his bike and threw away all of the items that might connect him with the Provenance Gallery. He tossed the bits and pieces away, one at a time. He even took the keys off the key ring and threw them away, one at a time.

  With that done, he wrapped up his combat knife in a piece of newspaper and threw it into the bottom of a nearby Dumpster. He hung on to the camera.

  For the next few days after the murder—it was the long weekend with the Martin Luther King Day holiday—he was glued to the TV, watching the news. He read the newspapers, cover to cover, looking for an article, a mention, something regarding Joyce Wishart and the Provenance Gallery.

  It seemed like a full week went by before the story finally made the news—and when it hit, it hit big!

  Chapter 32

  Flight

  On January 23, 2004, one week after the murder, Murphy filled out an application for a haircutting job at the Great Clips Salon in Bradenton. He was hired two days later. The manager of the salon was Monique Santiago (pseudonym), and it was owned by Joanne Terefinko.

  His coworker Cindy Keenan (pseudonym) at Great Clips said that she remembered thinking Murphy was a nice guy at first. But then he started speaking of the “spiritual arts” and Keenan decided to give Murphy some space.

  She didn’t remember the specifics of his beliefs, but she got the impression that Murphy thought he could “see the future.” He’d only worked at Great Clips for a couple of weeks, and she never saw him outside the salon.

  For the most part he was okay with the customers, engaging them in normal conversations about the weather, their careers, whatever. Only once in a while did he bring up his odd beliefs—people who live in the walls and stuff like that.

  When his manager told him to knock off the alien talk, Murphy lost his temper and “got in her face.” After that happened, Murphy gave off “a very bad vibe.”

  Murphy sometimes discussed his artistic pursuits; a couple of times, if someone expressed interest, he showed some of his art to the customers. As far as she knew, he never tried to sell any art. He did give some away, though.

  Keenan said the artist gave off bad vibes, but the art did not. Murphy’s artwork was happy—colorful, maybe watercolors, “splashes of stuff,” with lots of bright blues and greens, maybe some yellow.

  “Happy” was not the first word that sprang into Murphy’s mind when asked about his art at that time. “The artwork I showed to clients at Great Clips was supernatural in origin,” he explained—multidimensional supernatural, at that. “These were pictures of spirits created by spirits,” he explained.

  From his viewpoint it could hardly have been any other way. He was so involved in the spiritual world. The spiritual world was much more Murphy’s world than the real world was. He’d crossed over.

  The spiritual world, like a good lover, could be either dominant or submissive. Luckily for him, every time he summoned up a spirit to create a piece of art, the spirits accommodated him. He never knew what to expect. The results were eclectic—and, yes, some of the results looked happy, he admitted.

  “Even whimsical,” Murphy added.

  The incident that made Keenan feel most uncomfortable was when Murphy grabbed her hand and wouldn’t let go.

  “I really had to back off,” she recalled. “He was a strong guy and I made a mental note to never be caught alone with him.”

  Murphy started hypnotizing the customers again so he could feel them up and no one would care. Predictably, the end for Murphy at Great Clips came when a client accused him of inappropriate touching. The incident occurred on Saturday, January 31.

  Murphy left and never again saw the people at Great Clips. He stayed in his apartment on Shade Avenue until February 16. His behavior at his last haircutting job was so bad that cops were called and advised Murphy to hit the road, and soon.

  So he disassembled his bike, boxed it up, and carried it out the door. His next stop: the Sarasota bus terminal—less than a mile west, northwest from the murder scene. Under an assumed name he purchased a Greyhound bus ticket to Jacksonville.

  He stayed in a nice two-story motel in Jacksonville for a few days. Although he didn’t dwell on it, part of him understood he was no longer just “moving on.” He was no longer freedom personified. He was no longer an aimless, wandering sort of fellow.

  He was fleeing. He’d done something bad and it wasn’t a good idea to stay in one place for very long.

  Although the hotel was extremely comfortable, he didn’t stay in his room much. After reassembling his bike, he pedaled around Jacksonville for hours, looking for stuff to steal.

  His days were so filled with healthy outdoor activity that he slept like a log at night. And he was falling asleep by e
arly evening, experiencing a “good kind of tired.”

  He tried to stay focused. He was no longer under the delusion that he was gathering materials for his art, or cleaning up because his life was a never-ending battle against litter. He knew he was stealing for profit, and he tried to keep his mind from wandering.

  The occurrences in the Provenance Gallery crossed his mind occasionally, as one might expect. That was all. He was untroubled by feelings of guilt. He felt that his paranoia, his mental illness in general, was much milder than it had been a year earlier.

  He wasn’t looking for communications centers and surveillance teams as much as he was looking for fancy houses with no one home to break into.

  There was one aspect of his time in Joyce Wishart’s art gallery that was sticking in his craw— the camera, his lone remaining souvenir from the Provenance. It bothered him. He couldn’t use it, because he needed a computer to get the pictures. It had value, but he couldn’t hock it. There was a chance it could be traced back to Joyce Wishart.

  When he’d had his fill of Jacksonville, Murphy rode on his bike forty miles to the southeast to St. Augustine. On the way he disposed of the camera—he threw it into a lake. Now all of his murder souvenirs were gone. He only had his memories.

  Murphy pedaled into the beach town around midnight or one in the morning. It took him an annoyingly long time to find a place to stay. When he finally did locate a room to check into, it was in a hole-in-the-wall hotel, not nearly as nice as the place in Jacksonville.

  Not that he was difficult to please. “It was still comfortable,” Murphy said of the accommodations. He was so tired from his bike ride that he was asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

  In the morning he engaged in some early criminal activities. He liked to think of himself as a one-man crime wave. Ever since he left Sarasota, there had been crime after crime. He was a breaking-and-entering machine.

  And it wasn’t just burglaries, either. There were a couple of purse snatches, too. One woman’s wallet had $400 in it. Another had $300. One burglary netted him $450 in cash. He was traveling around Florida, leaving a trail of broken windows and pried-open doors.