Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  Grant asked if the man he was living with was into the alien thing.

  “Yeah,” Murphy replied, “which I thought was interesting, but it’s not something I’m following, certainly.”

  He only stayed for a month or so. Grant asked if anything “happened, or kind of felt uncomfortable.” Murphy said no. He just “preferred women.”

  Grant asked if he preferred living with a woman to living alone. Murphy said he did. He didn’t mind living alone, but he really enjoyed being married—both times.

  He admitted to regrets regarding his first wife. He sent her home to her mom so he could screw around. Looking back, he wished he’d been married longer to her.

  After living with Gallant, Murphy moved down to Inglewood Drive, in the town of Gibsonton, where he lived for three months.

  “It was a shit hole little trailer I found for rent in the newspaper.” Rent: $100 a week. There were some positives: “It was peaceful, and right on a little creek. You could see the creek right outside your window.”

  The landlord lived next door. Murphy worked just a little bit, just enough to get by. Cutting hair was “getting old.” So it was a stressful time. He was a middle-aged man thinking about changing careers.

  Murphy decided he couldn’t afford the car anymore, so he gave it back to Dean. He used it for the last time to see his kids and visit his brother. When the visit was over, Dean and Alane drove him back home. Dean had told police that they drove Brutus back on a Thursday. Murphy said that sounded about right—although he was just guessing. “I don’t know what day it is right now,” Murphy quipped.

  For the first two months of 2004, Murphy lived in an apartment on Shade Avenue in Sarasota. He answered an ad in the paper. It was okay, but Murphy didn’t make any friends there. He didn’t have a chance because of the rate of turnover, in and out, in and out, like a revolving door. The owner was a strong woman. The super was an old Spanish guy. The landlady didn’t trust the super, he remembered that. There was drama over getting Murphy’s toilet fixed.

  Police were familiar with the Shade Avenue address. Cops were called to that location many times. There had been many calls even during the time Murphy was living there, but Murphy’s name hadn’t come up in any of them.

  “Remember a guy named Albert Sanchez?” Grant asked, referring to the Shade Avenue superintendent who was arrested for stealing rent money.

  “I remember an Albert.”

  “Guy says you cooked dinner for him,” Grant said. The detective sounded nonchalant, but he was actually eager to discuss the meat that Murphy had cooked during January 2004.

  “Well, I’d be cooking and I’d give him some. I don’t cook good.”

  “He said you were a good cook.”

  “He’d smell it and say, ‘Umm-umm, something smells good!’” Murphy laughed. “I only had a hot plate, but once I boiled pork.”

  “Boiled pork?”

  “Yeah.”

  If Murphy was aware of the reason for the food questions, he didn’t let on—and Grant moved off the subject.

  “He said that you gave him a gift,” Grant said.

  “A knife. I gave him a knife,” Murphy said, looking pleased that he’d remembered.

  “That’s an unusual gift,” Grant commented.

  “Yeah, well, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Murphy said, sounding defensive.

  Detective Opitz chimed in. “What kind of a knife was it, Elton?”

  “It had a curved edge on it, and I don’t know what you would call it. . . .”

  “Do you remember when you gave Albert the knife?” Grant asked.

  “Sometime in January. Third, fourth week in January.”

  “Why a knife?”

  “Oh, I was just cleaning house. I started getting rid of everything I knew.”

  “Did you get rid of the knife before or after getting rid of the car?”

  “After.”

  Opitz asked, “Where were you planning on moving to?”

  “I was going to go to California eventually,” Murphy replied. “Actually, I had Oregon in mind, but I was going to spend some time in California first.”

  He had a license to cut hair in Oregon. He flew out west and got it sometime in the late 1990s, when he was living with Jane.

  “We talked to her,” Grant acknowledged. “She said she called you once and you said that you’d quit Regis and had become a day trader.”

  “Yeah, I did that for a while.”

  They took a break. Murphy was allowed to use the restroom. His right ankle cuff was loosened after he complained it had been digging into his anklebone since he was transported.

  Opitz returned the questioning to when Murphy got rid of the red car. What day had he arrived?

  Murphy didn’t remember what day exactly, but it wasn’t a Monday because that was the only day Dean’s restaurant was closed. The place had been open for business when he got there.

  What were Dean and his wife doing when Murphy arrived with the red car?

  “Dean was in the restaurant when I got there,” Murphy recalled. After a brief visit they left. He didn’t even stay a day. He asked Dean right off to drive him back; soon thereafter he did.

  At the time of Murphy’s Houston arrest, he had been in possession of prescription bottles with a Bradenton man’s name on them. Grant asked if Murphy knew that guy, and the prisoner shook his head no. He didn’t know how he came into possession of those bottles. Prescriptions were for a Craig Hoffman. Murphy didn’t know the guy. After a moment he decided that he did remember picking up those bottles. He’d found them by the side of the road when riding his bicycle.

  “What kind of prescription was it?” Opitz asked.

  “There was Valium and Tylenol 3.”

  Grant said Murphy must have realized the seriousness of the crime for which he was being interrogated. He didn’t have to worry about talking about prescription bottles.

  “Did you take any of the pills?” Grant asked.

  “Yeah, well, I had never tried Valium in my life, and I wanted to try them for the heck of it. And, to be honest, I tried them and they didn’t make me feel good, so I just held on to them. I thought somebody else might want them, or I might try them again someday when I was stressed out.”

  “When did you find the bottles?”

  “February.” Not long before he was arrested in Houston, and that was February 25. He had decided to leave Florida only a few days before that.

  “It was just time to go, man,” Murphy explained. “I was gearing up for getting rid of all my stuff.”

  Opitz asked, “What’d you do with all of your artwork and stuff ?”

  “I just kept giving it away. I threw a bunch of it away.” A lot of it ended up at a flea market in Bradenton, but there were two flea markets: the Wagon Wheel and the Big Top—and he didn’t remember which one.

  “What do you remember?”

  “It was the one with the red barn. I gave it to a woman named Ann something. Ann Marie, maybe.” He was just there and she was smiling at him, and he thought this looked like a good home for his stuff.

  Grant asked what sort of stuff she sold. Murphy said she sold freaky stuff. Gothic. He told her his name was Brutus, no last name, and the stuff was hers. She’d probably never see him again and that was cool because he didn’t want any money.

  Grant produced Murphy’s business card and asked him about it. Murphy said he’d had them printed himself—not many, fifty maybe—just to give out to people who might be interested in his artwork. He didn’t hand out many and ended up throwing most of them away.

  Still, Grant noted, Murphy was making an effort to sell his art, which meant he was going to places where selling art was possible, such as flea markets and galleries.

  Murphy said he didn’t go to any galleries—just flea markets. And he didn’t sell any art—just gave it away. To Ann Marie, and to some other chick at the flea market near Gibsonton and Ruskin. That was the place where he handed out about twen
ty business cards and threw the rest on the floor.

  Grant asked if he remembered any of the people to whom he gave a card. Murphy said no, except he gave a few to his coworkers at Regis.

  He added, “I never called on a single art gallery to try to sell my work.” Then he took it back and said he did go into one gallery, in a mall on Route 41, next to the food court. He never did show his stuff to the lady in there, just told her he was leaving town and looking to get rid of some stuff. She wasn’t interested. She only wanted local artists. This was Sarasota and he said he was from Bradenton.

  Grant asked about Murphy’s bicycle. What became of it?

  Murphy said it was falling apart, the chain kept jumping, so he threw it in a Dumpster.

  “How did you get to Houston?”

  “Hitchhiked.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not going to elaborate, but I did indeed hitchhike.” All right, he was at one point in a bus station, where he stole a bag and a bus ticket. “I went to a lot of places,” Murphy added.

  Grant thanked Murphy for being so honest. Grant said Murphy struck him as a “pretty honest guy,” a guy who told the truth until he got to something that might hurt him and then he “kind of backed off.”

  Murphy nodded his agreement. He admitted that he didn’t like to talk about the thefts he’d committed, and there were “more than one of them.” When he was on the road, he tended to swipe things along the way. He stole a backpack at a bus station and then filled it with other stuff he stole.

  Grant summed it up for Murphy. At that point Murphy’s game plan was to go to Oregon and cut hair. Murphy said yes. Grant wanted to know, if that was the plan, why did he stash his haircutting tools? Murphy said they were stashed so that he would have access to them when he got to Oregon.

  Grant became blunt: “If your barber equipment didn’t have anything to do with our killing, why is it a big secret where it’s stashed?”

  Murphy said, “The stash contains stolen items.”

  Grant said he didn’t care about the stolen items. In the overall scheme of things, the stolen items were small. He was interested in the stash because barber instruments were sharp.

  The detective had talked to people who knew Murphy and they said those instruments were special to him. “We don’t throw away things that are special to us,” Grant added.

  “Well, I did,” Murphy said, raising his right hand as if taking an oath. The police knew he was lying. He’d already admitted once to stashing the tools, now he was reverting to his earlier lie that he had dumped all of his belongings.

  “Would you dump them if they had evidence on them?”

  “Not at all,” Murphy said, shaking his head with sincerity.

  “Then you wouldn’t mind telling us where you dumped them.”

  “I dumped them, piece by piece, a little here, a little there, down the road. . . .”

  “Where?”

  “In the garbage at a bus terminal in Tallahassee, on Tennessee Street, to be honest with you.”

  “You went from Sarasota to Houston via Tallahassee ?” Opitz asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And why did you get rid of the stuff piecemeal?” Grant asked.

  “I got tired of carrying. I was getting my load lighter and lighter as I went along.”

  Grant asked Murphy to itemize the things he got rid of. Murphy said all of his clippers, and maybe eight to ten pairs of scissors.

  “Uh-huh. According to Dean, you had another item you’re not mentioning.”

  Murphy said, “Straight razor.”

  “Yeah,” Grant replied, with a raised eyebrow.

  “It was just a little thing for giving shaves,” Murphy explained. It would have made a lousy weapon because the blade was so thin and easily breakable.

  Grant said, “You know there are some tough questions that I have to ask you.”

  “Ask away,” Murphy said.

  Grant shifted the subject away from the razor to Murphy’s apparent need, in later years, to molest his clients as he cut their hair.

  Murphy said he thought the touchy-feely behavior was part of the spiritual process he was going through. He’d touched many more than the ones he had gotten caught touching. “I’ve touched hundreds,” Murphy bragged.

  The sexual touching was done after placing the subject in a hypnotic trance. The touching itself was so subtle that the great majority of them never realized they were being touched. He was a “master hypnotist.”

  And that wasn’t where his powers ended. He was able to amplify the hypnosis with his spiritual connection. People said that you couldn’t hypnotize a person who didn’t want to be hypnotized, but that wasn’t true, according to Murphy. The spiritual connection allowed him to overrule that so-called rule. Unfortunately, his powers were just shy of being perfect. Once every 150 times or so, the person realized they were being touched.

  “When you touch them, what do you do?”

  “I feel up their titties. I even kissed some of them on the back of the neck.”

  He got to the point where he could hypnotize more than one person simultaneously. “I could put a whole room out,” he bragged.

  He could feel up titties right in front of people, but they wouldn’t be able to see him do it. One woman, he recalled, didn’t go under. She put up with the touching at first, like she was paralyzed, but then she ran out of the shop.

  “I saw her crying, out in front of the shop,” Murphy added.

  “That was in Sarasota?”

  “Brandon. I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh, I got caught.’”

  “When did you start with the touching?”

  “Autumn of 2003.”

  He didn’t just do it when he was cutting hair, either. He’d do it wherever. He’d feel up the lady in front of him on the grocery checkout line.

  “Did you have specific and vivid memories of feeling up the clients?”

  Murphy said he did. He was working in a shop at the time in a mall that had a Walmart.

  Grant said he didn’t like the word, but he thought this act fit in with a pattern of sexual “deviances” that Murphy enjoyed. The various deviances Murphy practiced were known as “paraphilia.” It included sexual contact with people who were unaware, wife swapping, voyeurism.

  “Was it your ultimate goal to be able to hypnotize people to the point where you could secretly have sex with them?”

  The question caused a short surge of energy in the prisoner. Murphy said yes. “That’s my goal, my dream. I got to where I was very good at it. I’m not going to tell you how good.”

  In the long run it was his spiritual connection more than his hypnotism skills that allowed him to get away with what he did. It was a God-given thing. He liked to call it “the Power.” He’d gotten to the point where he could “pretty much do anything” sexually.

  “Kind of like being a pickpocket,” Grant said—and Murphy liked the analogy.

  Murphy admitted he was a voyeur; it was true. “I watched another guy fuck my wife and it turned me on,” he said. “And I’ve watched other guys fuck their wives as well.”

  “What are your other interests?” Grant asked.

  “I’m pretty straightlaced, but I like the gothic chicks—you know, the ones who look like vampires and stuff, dress all in black.”

  “Are you familiar with necrophilia?”

  “Uh, no. I heard that name, though.”

  “It means someone that derives pleasure from sex with people that are dead. Ever have any thoughts or fantasies like that?”

  “No.”

  “Because those gothic chicks, they’re always, you know, kind of pale. Like they’re dead.”

  “Those girls get a bad rap. I met one once—she was a devout Christian.”

  “Can’t judge a book by its cover,” Grant said. “Some people do like sex with the dead, like to have sex in a cemetery, in the back of a hearse. I’m not judging them. Whatever floats their boat.”

  Opitz added, “So
me of them just have their sexual partner lay there still and pretend they’re dead.”

  Murphy was silent, just taking it all in.

  “What about bondage?” Grant asked.

  Murphy responded quickly: “I’m not so much into that, and I’ll tell you why. . . .”

  His wife Paula had had a bondage experience before they met. She had gotten drunk with a guy and went home with him. He tied her up and said he was going to rape her.

  “Maybe, I’m not sure, he told her he was going to kill her. She got away from the guy. I don’t know if he passed out or what. Short time after that, this guy did rape and kill a girl, and Paula testified against him at the trial, put his ass away,” Murphy said.

  “You have any personal experience with bondage?”

  “I only allowed one person to handcuff me, if you don’t count cops,” Murphy said. “It didn’t do much for me.”

  “You ever use bondage on anyone else?”

  “No. Well, one time, sort of.”

  He met this girl and she went into the bathroom. She came out with a little body outfit on and dangling handcuffs. She tried to handcuff him, but he turned the table on her and put them on her, just one of them on her leg. He wasn’t sure that counted as bondage.

  “I’ve never fantasized about handcuffs, if that’s what you mean,” he concluded.

  “What kind of fantasies do you have?” Grant asked.

  “Multiple partners. Wives. I love doing other people’s wives.”

  It was two pleasures in one, Murphy explained. First of all, it was sex, but it was also the joy of taking a sacred object, something that is sacred to someone else. He was turned on both by other men’s wives and by watching other men with his wife. “I’m no hypocrite,” he added.

  Grant wanted to know how Murphy went about recruiting a man to have sex with his wife so he could watch.

  Murphy said the first few guys he asked said no. Then one day he was cutting this guy’s hair and he asked if he’d like to come home and have a threesome. The guy said sure. Then he called Paula, told her he’d gotten a handsome guy to do it. The guy ended up turning Paula on; they had him over two, three times.