Back at the hole-in-the-wall, he again disassembled his bike, but this time he took the parts outside, a few at a time, and threw them in a Dumpster.
That afternoon he took a Greyhound to Tallahassee under a different alias. He stayed in Tallahassee for only a few hours before taking another bus to Mobile, Alabama. He spent the night in a motel; the next day he caught the bus to Houston, Texas.
The bus stopped for a leg-stretching break at the New Orleans terminal, which was huge, with many, many busses parked side by side. The most busses he’d ever seen in one place. Plus, a lot of hustle and bustle.
It was past ten at night when the bus pulled into the Houston terminal. The Houston bus station was not nearly as busy as the one in New Orleans. Still, there was a moderate level of activity—it wasn’t deserted or anything like that. Plus, the Houston terminal was a well-lit location. Murphy liked that.
Murphy set off into the city, “looking for a motel”—walking straight or making turns, without rhyme or reason—but he never made it.
Chapter 33
The Dentist’s Office
Murphy didn’t know why, but he had always been attracted to homes that were converted into businesses. It was that very attraction that—on the evening of February 25, 2004—led Murphy to break into Midtown Dentistry on Westheimer Road in Houston.
It wasn’t just any dentist’s office, either. It was the office of Dr. Jonathan Penchas, a so-called “superdentist,” with an expertise in maxillofacial prosthodontics. The building was a two-story framed structure, with yellow lap siding.
“I entered by smashing out a rear window with my hatchet,” Murphy said. “The alarm went off immediately.” He climbed through the window, found the alarm panel, and turned off the alarm. He found and pocketed $60 in a desk drawer—his final act as a free man—and was standing in the reception area when he knew the jig was up. Flashing lights, screeching brakes. When he looked out the front window, he saw a policeman approaching the building, with his gun drawn. Then there were two more. Murphy threw his hands up in the air.
Murphy was caught red-handed. The first responder to the alarm was Officer Shawna Hampton, who found the dentist’s front door locked. However, there was a broken window on the building’s south side. Officer Hampton saw a light go on upstairs just before fellow officers arrived on the scene. Houston police officers J. J. Garcia, a field training officer, and Jaclyn “Jackie” Clark, a probationary officer in field training, made the bust. When arrested, Murphy still had the hatchet. He also had on his person a jackknife and three different prescription narcotics (fifty-three Valium pills, seven Tylenol with codeine, and forty-nine Darvon).
He did not resist.
Murphy was plenty mad at being caught—but there was evidence that he was an angry man before that, too.
One cop observed, “The suspect was found inside the business, which was ransacked with property destroyed.”
The alarm panel was destroyed, apparently smashed with some sort of object. The dentist had a small living space above his office. The burglar had gone up there as well, opened the refrigerator, and helped himself to a couple of cans of beer.
When Dr. Penchas arrived at his office, Murphy had already been apprehended, his hands still up in the air. The dentist had never seen the man before. The burglar was dressed all in black and was wearing a headlamp on his head. Dr. Penchas recalled thinking that this guy was like a “Hollywood burglar,” straight out of central casting.
There’s something to be said for “Texas justice.” It’s quick. In a month Murphy was assigned a public defender, quickly tried, convicted, and was sentenced to a year in jail.
Pow!
He was sent to the Pam Lychner State Jail, forty-five minutes outside Houston, which was for prisoners who were serving terms less than two years.
“Even though they still called it ‘jail,’ it was really prison,” Murphy observed.
And it was hot—the hottest cell he’d ever been in. “Luckily, they gave me lots of paper and pens and colored pencils so I could be creative. I dripped sweat onto the many drawings I drew,” he said.
Just as before, the drawings were all spiritual in nature, “loaded with spirits.”
He was in that Texas jail for at least two and a half months. His job while there was cutting the other inmates’ hair, which one might think would be Murphy’s dream job.
“I hated cutting inmates’ hair,” Murphy said, still angered by the memories. “They always wanted haircuts I wasn’t allowed to give.”
It was always something. They wanted it longer on top than he was allowed to do, or they wanted shorter on the sides than the rules allowed. No one was happy.
He requested a transfer, which was granted, and joined a small group of inmates that cleaned up the outside visitation area. He also was allowed to step outside the jail’s fence momentarily when he took out the trash.
Then he got in trouble. Murphy didn’t want to talk about what he did, but it was bad enough to land him three months of solitary confinement in the summer, miserably hot, soaked with sweat all day and night.
During his incarceration Murphy gave authorities a sample of his DNA.
While in jail he wrote letters to his brother and sister-in-law. The letters contained now familiar bragging. He said he had a calling, that he was strong and “getting stronger by the minute.” He said that he was drawing and coloring pictures and sending them to his kids. His fellow inmates were “amazed” and respected him because of his artistic brilliance.
The letters were filled with racial hatred, as Murphy reacted to the fact that his new jail home was not segregated. Murphy wrote that he didn’t need for them to send him any money. He had plenty of money on him when he was arrested, more than enough to last him the year he’d be in jail. He wrote that he knew he seemed crazy sometimes, but they had to trust his instincts.
The DNA match between the Murphy sample in Texas and the one left at the scene of Wishart’s murder took longer than it should have because of a glitch in the FDLE database.
PART III
JUSTICE
Chapter 34
Good Old-Fashioned Police Work—Building a Case
Suzanna Ulery had just told Detective Jim Glover that a match had been found for the DNA that was foreign to the victim’s found at the Joyce Wishart crime scene. The DNA sample that matched, Ulery said, had come from the State of Florida’s Convicted Offender DNA Database. Ulery said, “Elton Brutus Murphy’s DNA was obtained as a result of his burglary conviction in Leon County.”
The matching samples were those taken from skin found on the alcove carpet under the body, blood found on a copy of New Magazine, and blood found inside the victim’s right shoe.
The name rang no bell. It hadn’t come up once during the Sarasota Police Department’s exhaustive investigation. Thank God for science, Glover thought, or this bastard would have gotten away with it.
Murphy was not going to be difficult to locate. He was housed at that moment in the Pam Lychner State Jail in Humble, Texas, where he was serving a one-year term for burglary. Murphy had been in that jail since February 26, 2004, about five and a half weeks after the Sarasota murder. He was tall, with brown hair and green eyes. When free, he cut a well-groomed appearance, wearing Dockers most of the time and neatly pressed shirts.
Captain Tom Laracey and Sergeant Norman Reilly were informed of the match. Laracey called a meeting for the following day in the CID’s conference room. Also at that briefing were Detective David Grant and Bruce Steinberg, a criminal analyst.
Detective Glover contacted Lieutenant Danny Billingsley at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) in Texas and made arrangements for a couple of Sarasota investigators to go there and interview Murphy. They would need a Texas bench warrant. The interview could not take place at the state jail, so the prisoner would need to be transported to the county jail facility. That would take some time; but, in the meantime, the Sarasota investigators could go to Housto
n and examine the items that were found on Murphy’s person at the time of his Texas arrest.
This was done on July 28, 2004. His items held in the Houston Police Department (HPD) evidence room included a backpack, a fanny pack, a hatchet, two cordless drills, red gloves, clothes, tin snips, and a set of keys with a dog tag (with the name Edward A. Dupuis), two books, and a folding knife in a leather pouch. Inside the backpack Detective Grant found batteries wrapped in a black sock, an apparent improvised blackjack.
Waiting for the Texas bench warrant and the transfer of the prisoner also gave the SPD an opportunity to talk to some of the people who knew Murphy the best, to get an idea what he was all about before plotting their interrogation.
Florida law enforcement started with Murphy’s first wife, Elaine Crabtree, who had changed her name to Margaret Towne. She told Detective Philip DeNiro that during their three years of marriage, Murphy had frequently discussed his dream to become a minister.
“He had at least two bisexual relationships before we were married,” the woman said. It turned out that this meant he’d been a third bedmate for swinging couples.
She was twenty-two, and was named Elaine Crabtree, when she married Brutus. He was twenty. They lived in Pensacola and Bermuda on a naval base, and they spoke in tongues.
“He wanted very much to be a preacher, and I wanted very much to be a preacher’s wife,” she said. He had been very religious when they first met. They broke up because he fooled around with other women. He picked them up in bars.
Asked about Murphy’s dad, Towne said she knew he was abusive and died drunk. “When they found him, he was surrounded by, like, thirty empty bottles,” she said. He hadn’t just died drunk; he drank himself to death. The mom remarried.
What did she know about his other women? Not much. She assumed that he’d gotten married a few years after they split up, because she’d received an annulment form from the Catholic Church, which she signed.
“Any abuses during the marriage?” Detective DeNiro inquired.
“He became abusive and tried to kill me about three times,” she said. One time he put a towel around her neck and tried to choke her. “He was in some kind of trance and I had to slap him out of it.”
Another time, in Bermuda, they were riding on a motorcycle and he became very angry with her. He began pounding on her head. “If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, I probably would have died!” she exclaimed.
The third attempt came when they were renting canoes, not far from where his mom lived. He took the paddle from the canoe and struck her over the head with it. They were divorced soon after that, and she hadn’t seen him in years.
The police wanted to know more about Murphy’s mother. Anyone who had witnessed the Provenance crime scene had to conclude that Murphy had oedipal issues. The woman said Murphy’s mother was a hard woman; she had no choice but to be hard because of the man she married. She’d died just a few years back, following a fall in her home.
She concluded the interview by saying that Murphy had had many affairs with other women during their marriage, and that he enjoyed being in the woods.
On July 30, 2004, Detectives Mike Jackson and Anthony DeFrancisco interviewed Dave Gallant, the man Murphy met in a bookstore and went on to share alternative beliefs with. Gallant told them he met Murphy around Christmas, 2002, in the Barnes & Noble in the Brandon Town Center. The fast friends had gone for coffee together. Gallant ended up giving Murphy his phone number. After that, Murphy called every once in a while at night and they would chat about religion. Murphy came over to his place a few times and told Gallant he was a hairdresser for women. He said he got into an argument at the salon, lost his job, and was about to lose his apartment. Gallant invited him to move in with him, and Murphy did—for three or four months, starting April or May 2003.
On July 22, 2003, Murphy borrowed Gallant’s car with permission and totaled it. Murphy suffered a broken collarbone in the accident and was “laid up for a while.” After the accident Murphy stayed in his room a lot. He and Gallant didn’t talk much. Murphy still went to work, however.
“He was a big, strong man, and he was powering through the pain,” Gallant commented.
It wasn’t that he got mad because the guy totaled his car, but they didn’t chat quite as much after the accident. Murphy borrowed the car because his red Geo was broken, and Gallant loaned him $500 to have it fixed. He never saw that money again.
Then came a time that summer—August, maybe—when Gallant spent the weekend with his girlfriend. When he returned on Sunday, Murphy and his belongings were gone. No note, nothing.
Murphy left some stuff behind, in a storage shed in the back: two pairs of shoes, several computers, a hot plate, and a roll of metal, which he had picked up somewhere to make a sculpture with. Murphy himself had put that stuff in the shed when he moved in. There was a combination lock on the shed, and Murphy knew the combination. It was not uncommon for him to go out to the shed. Gallant had no idea what he did back there. Gallant said he didn’t know where Murphy lived before he became his roommate. At one time he knew where Murphy worked, but he’d forgotten. He had Murphy’s business card at one point, but he was pretty sure he’d thrown it away.
Gallant saw Murphy once after that. It was winter and Murphy showed up, unannounced, and stayed for maybe an hour. It was cold out and Murphy wasn’t dressed for it, just a T-shirt and pants. He was carrying a gym bag, which he put on top of Gallant’s freezer during the visit. They talked religion, and Gallant passed on some “new information” he’d learned. Gallant was under the impression that Murphy had just gotten fired from a job. Gallant assumed that Murphy would spend the night, maybe move back in with him, but Murphy left without saying where he was headed. Gallant looked out the window and saw Murphy leaving in a car, and that was the last he ever saw of him. Gallant noticed no injuries. Murphy seemed fine—relaxed, casual. He was usually kind of a stressed-out guy, but not on that last visit. It was strange.
When asked if anything was missing after Murphy took off that one weekend, Gallant thought and said yes, the license plate from the totaled car. He’d had it on a table out in the shed after the accident and then it was gone. He assumed that Murphy took it. It had to be him. No one else knew the combination for the lock. It was odd. Gallant had thousands of dollars’ worth of tools back there and Murphy just took a license plate. That was all he knew about Murphy. Gallant concluded by saying he was done with Florida. Gallant’s plans were to sell his house and head west, maybe to New Mexico.
Detectives Glover and Grant interviewed Albert Sanchez, the super of the transient rooming house on Shade Avenue in Sarasota, where Murphy had been living at the time of the murder.
Sanchez said he remembered four things about Murphy: He drove a Geo Metro for a time. He rode a bike after that. He was a good cook, always cooking stew. He wore a backpack sometimes.
Any recollection of when Murphy cooked stew? No.
The detectives were struck by two facts that just might fit together: First, Murphy stole his victim’s vagina from the murder scene. Second, Murphy cooked stew.
What Sanchez didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, they guessed—and they couldn’t help but wonder if Murphy’s stew contained a secret ingredient.
Murphy’s second ex-wife, Paula, spoke to Detectives DeNiro and Carmen Woods about her ex-husband. Paula provided the investigation with useful dates. They were married in 1987, divorced 1996. They lived in Tallahassee, where they ran a haircutting place together. They had two kids, who were ages fifteen and eleven in 2004. She was Catholic, and Murphy had been adamant that he did not want the kids raised as Catholics. She told police that Murphy had a short temper—he yelled at her and the kids too much—but he had never been violent with her. She remembered him as a bit of a hoarder, collecting magazines and newspapers. She didn’t recall him being artistic when they were together. (Amazingly, it seems, Murphy kept his artistic feelings internal. His gathering of art materials translated to Pa
ula as hoarding, his “gallery” in their haircutting shop was, to her, storage.)
Regarding his religion, Paula said, “He kind of didn’t believe in God, but he was looking into several different religions before we got together.”
She told police about the time she had sex with another man while Murphy watched. “I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I did it,” she said. Murphy, she added, was merely a spectator at this event and was in no way a participant.
After the divorce, she said, Murphy went to Tampa and moved in with his mother, Betty Jo. He was distraught over the breakup and began to act out. He paid child support until 2002. He took each child for two weeks every summer. He called every Sunday. Then it all stopped. That was the same year he went to jail, and also when his peculiar behavior worsened.
In the recent past—sometime in January 2004—Murphy showed up at Paula’s house to see the kids. This troubled her, because it was the first time he’d ever just shown up without calling first. He arrived right at dinnertime, driving his little red Geo. He brought a used computer, which he gave to Trevor. The car appeared to be in good condition, and it didn’t look filled up with stuff.
He stayed for three or four hours—had dinner, spent time with both children—and as he left, he told Paula that he “had to get back to Tampa.” He drove off in the tiny red car.
Other than its unexpected nature, Paula could recall nothing unusual about the visit.
“Wait, there was one thing,” she said. “He had bruises on his arms,” she said.
Evil Season Page 18