Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  “When you say ‘threesome,’ does that mean that you participated as well?” Grant asked.

  “Oh yeah, we doubled. I would do her some, and then he would do her some.”

  “From the way you talked before, I thought you just sat there and watched.”

  Murphy shook his head. Sometimes they would take turns having oral sex with her. Sometimes Paula would give Murphy oral sex, while the other guy was having vaginal intercourse with her.

  Grant asked if Murphy had contact with the other guy during the threesome.

  “Uh, yeah, but it was just random. I never actually, you know . . .”

  He put a condom on one guy once, but that was earlier. Back when he was in his twenties, he had been the third with a married couple in their forties. They had had a picnic; then they went back to the couple’s mobile home and got it on. That time the husband gave Murphy oral sex. But he didn’t feel like a guy with bisexual tendencies. It was more just a means to the end, to the real fantasy, which was to have sex with the guy’s wife.

  “Do you ever have sexual fantasies about possessing someone totally?” Grant asked. “What would you consider the ultimate?”

  “I guess the ultimate would be to have that individual anytime I wanted. I could do it to them again and again, whenever I wanted, and they wouldn’t realize it.”

  “Did you ever get to that point?”

  “I haven’t. But I have engaged in sex with people when they didn’t realize it.”

  “Did you ever have an occasion when you thought they were hypnotized and you were about to have sex with them, and all of a sudden they said no or something bad happened?” Opitz asked.

  “There were times when the hypnotism wasn’t working as well as I thought and I had to quickly go back to whatever else I was doing, drinking coffee or whatever.”

  Murphy decided he’d talked enough on the subject. He wasn’t going to give them anything that might result in a rape charge. He explained that this was one of those times when he was “backing off.”

  At this juncture Grant switched subjects. “Let me take you back to January 16, 2004.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know where you were that day?”

  “I’m not good with dates. I have thought about it, trying to determine my alibi, but nothing specific comes to mind. All I know is that I was following my routine. If I wasn’t at work, I was riding my bicycle or taking a walk or eating.”

  “Where would you ride?”

  “Around my neighborhood.”

  “We’ve showed your picture around, and people remember seeing you in downtown Sarasota—in places you claimed you hadn’t been.”

  “If they could positively identify me, I might have been downtown,” Murphy said with a laugh. Then: “Yeah, I’ve been downtown. Might’ve stopped for coffee—coffee shop and a bookstore, right there on the corner.”

  “You remember when that was?”

  “January.”

  “The sixteenth?”

  “Could’ve been. I don’t know. I didn’t peddle my artwork.”

  “Other than haircutting, you work anyplace else in Sarasota?”

  “No.”

  “You tell your sister-in-law you were working for a lady in an art gallery?”

  “Right,” Murphy said, remembering.

  “You said you were helping a lady who had a couple of grown kids, and she was going to help you sell some of your art, right?”

  “Yeah, I made a big elaborate lie, said the lady had a bunch of artists working for her, and that I rented space there. . . .”

  “She doesn’t remember that part,” Grant said.

  Murphy tried to explain. He said he was telling a lot of lies at that time because he didn’t want people to know he was planning major thefts and to leave Sarasota.

  Grant said, “You’re being inconsistent.” Earlier, Murphy had said the reason he was leaving Sarasota was that he was all touchy-feely with the women whose hair he cut, and the sheriff’s department had come over to confront him.

  Murphy said they were both true. He’d already planned on leaving Sarasota before the lady detective came to visit. That just hurried up the process. He was already getting rid of his stuff in preparation for going mobile.

  Grant asked Murphy why he bled so much. There was blood on his backpack, on his fanny pack, blood all over. Murphy said he had a problem with sores that didn’t heal.

  “I have wounds that haven’t healed in years. They start to itch, I scratch, and pretty soon I’m bleeding again,” Murphy said. There was another reason for all of the blood, however. He cut himself while committing a burglary. It happened when he broke the window to get in.

  Grant said he’d noticed the scab picking. It grew worse when Murphy was alone, but he could sort of control it when he knew someone was watching. Grant said it seemed like compulsive behavior to him, and Murphy agreed.

  “I’ve been doing this for eight, ten years—picking that same spot.”

  “I believe you’re hypnotizing yourself, because you’re touching yourself all the time.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Murphy said with a laugh.

  Grant said Murphy also had a habit of sticking his hands down into his pants when no one was looking. Murphy said he picked that up in jail because it was cold, and it was a way to keep his hands warm.

  “I don’t have a hard-on when I do it,” Murphy added. “It’s just a little nervous habit I picked up.”

  “It’s compulsive,” Grant said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Murphy said, “like people who blink their eyes too much.”

  Grant shifted suddenly to the crux of the situation: “In relation to our case, I was wondering if we’ve gotten to a point in time when we could handle the truth.”

  “I wasn’t going to share this with everyone, because it has to do with my spiritual calling and it’s going to turn a lot of people against me. But at the same time it may be time for me to start sharing. I’ve been forming my own religion, you know. I believe there is a god beyond the God in the Bible.”

  The cops were impatient with Murphy’s evasive jibber-jabber.

  “Okay,” Grant said, “but getting back to our crime, in the gallery, you said you couldn’t handle the truth of what happened there. You said you couldn’t tell us everything about that incident.”

  “I don’t recall referring to that gallery. If you took it that way, it’s not how I meant it.”

  “Okay, because you know, we’re curious about what happened. We know, because of the physical evidence, that it is true, that it happened. But cops are not always looking for what happened, but also why it happened, so we can make sense of the whole thing.”

  “I’m insisting adamantly today that I was never in that gallery and I never killed that woman. I’m sticking to that story and I’m insisting I’m not guilty.” Murphy laughed and said, “I’m also insisting I’ll walk away a free man for this.”

  “We could disagree on that,” Grant said, not laughing. “There comes a point when denial is ridiculous. I have a pretty good idea what happened. I’m more interested in the why.”

  “I am not going to admit to this murder.”

  “You’re doing what you have to do for your protection. But if it gets to the point where denial is ridiculous, I’d appreciate you discussing with me the why.”

  “I can pretty much promise you that I never will.” Murphy laughed again.

  Opitz reentered the conversation. He said that Murphy had written a letter to his brother. The letter contained some interesting things. “You said, ‘I create life in the missions. I am thankful everything I do will be justified.’ What were you talking about there?”

  Murphy said he was talking about the hypnosis and touching and things like that.

  Grant said, “Every religion at some point has something to do with sacrifice. What happened in the gallery could be interpreted as a sacrifice. Would your god justify what happened in the gallery? Would
religious sacrifice be a valid reason for someone to die?”

  “‘Sacrifice’ is your word. I never mentioned that.”

  “I’m just saying, generally . . .”

  Murphy explained his religion. He was the coordinator between his new god—he didn’t have a name for the new god yet, and the God of the Bible, and of Jesus, and of Satan.

  “I deal with all of them.” Heaven and hell had been destroyed. “All of mankind is in prison in the new hell, including myself.”

  Murphy’s job was to help the inhabitants of the new hell, who had previously been in the old heaven, to be free. “I help in their release efforts.”

  Grant said it didn’t make sense. How could he be serving the same religion one minute by committing selfless acts, and later by committing selfish acts of chaos?

  Murphy said it might seem like a contradiction, but—as far as he was concerned—it was all part of the same process.

  Grant said that in an upscale neighborhood like downtown Sarasota, a murder in an art gallery could be considered chaos.

  Murphy said he didn’t kill that woman, but he agreed with the premise that the murder was chaotic. Everything he knew about the murder came from what he’d read in the papers or from video clips on TV. He’d seen pictures of computers being confiscated from the gallery and the body being carried out.

  Grant said he knew that the photo of the confiscated computers ran in the paper, because he, in fact, had been the one carrying the computers. “I also know for a fact that there are no photos, no video, of the body being removed.”

  “Well, maybe I just thought I saw it,” Murphy said.

  Opitz asked, “Is it possible that you were down there and just happened to see it?”

  “No, uh-uh,” Murphy said.

  Grant said, “One thing I will tell you is that there was a camera that was installed inside the gallery after the murder. Would it surprise you if I told you there is somebody on there who looks very much like you? Did you ever wander by there afterward and look through the window?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know that there is software for facial recognition, right?”

  (Grant was bluffing, of course. The recording had been almost useless. You could tell that there was an adult male looking in the window, but that was about it.)

  “I used to be a military photographer—Soviet spying and shit. I guarantee you try to match that face in the window to mine, it won’t happen.”

  “We have evidence, we believe,” Opitz said.

  “And you know what that evidence is,” Grant said.

  “We’re just trying to figure out how it happened. One possibility is that it’s involved somehow with your hypnosis thing. Maybe something went wrong and she did something that made you strike back at her, and it got carried away,” Opitz theorized.

  “It didn’t happen. No, I never hypnotized her,” Murphy said. “I never had sex with her, never hypnotized her. I have never been intimate with her.”

  “Did you cut her hair?” Grant said.

  “It’s possible I did cut her hair.”

  “If you cut her hair, you might have hypnotized her.”

  “Well, that’s possible,” Murphy conceded. “How can I say for certain? Other than pictures in the papers, I don’t even know what this woman looked like. Who knows? I find myself fuckin’ so many of them. I did them all, yeah.”

  “Total chaos,” Grant said.

  Opitz commented, “Let’s talk about the artwork you made while you were in jail. Nude women. Legs spread. Demons and stuff all over the place. Looks like a scene you were imagining, something that happened, something you were recalling and drawing later.”

  “No, the imagery just flows. I make the imagery access a lot of energy through different ways.”

  “Your art hasn’t been widely accepted,” Grant said.

  “That is usually the case,” Murphy replied. “People don’t know what to do with my art. They either loved it, or . . . they are scared of it.”

  Grant said he was going to say something, and it required no response from the prisoner. It was just something for Murphy to file away for possible future consideration: “I believe the whole scene and everything at the art gallery was an art form.”

  “I hear you. That’s fine. But I’m disagreeing with what you’re saying.”

  “I’m anxious to test my theory, because I think you are probably one of the brighter, most articulate, artistic people I’ve ever met. You are complex. Definitely complex. I think that scene at the gallery featured your greatest fantasy. It was art comprised of somebody totally possessed by art. You know what I mean?”

  Murphy said he did. The theory sounded good, plausible, geared for him to appreciate it—but it wasn’t true. “My artwork flows from different places. Picasso helped me with one of my paintings.”

  “As an artist you are not a mainstream sort of guy,” Grant observed.

  Murphy said he met a chick at a flea market, a tall redhead named Sandy. She said she once worked on a painting so intensely that she went into the painting and finished it from the inside. Murphy said he believed her, and he found that kind of trance or transformation fascinating.

  Chapter 36

  The Nine-Inch Gash

  A few days after the interview with Murphy, Sarasota law enforcement announced their intentions of arresting Murphy and charging him with Joyce Wishart’s murder.

  Murphy was examined by four psychologists, one of whom worked for the state. Murphy said he didn’t need to get up close and personal with other humans in order to kill them. He could kill people by staring at an ambulance or fire truck. He could heal people by touching them. He told the psychologists that he had been in touch with aliens and that he was the leader of a thousand-member cult.

  Following up on the lead from Murphy regarding a tall redhead named Sandy, Detectives Glover and Grant went to the Midway Flea Market and searched for the woman with a booth who, according to Murphy, took his painted plates.

  They found Sandy Rucinski, who remembered Murphy: “He was very strange. He asked me to coffee, but I declined.”

  He’d given her a business card, with his phone number and e-mail address. Printed in one corner was What’s real?

  During August 2004, Hurricane Charley ravaged sections of Florida. The detectives wanted to reinterview the folks out at Solomon’s Castle, but they had to wait. Murphy’s brother and sister-in-law were in the process of having the damage to their home repaired.

  When the follow-up interviews were finally performed, Murphy’s family had nothing new to say about him—although Alane did have an interesting question for the men: “Was there something ritualistic or satanic about the crime scene?”

  On August 18, 2004, the affidavit of probable cause was filed. It argued that a DNA sample volunteered by Elton Brutus Murphy was a match for DNA found inside the victim’s shoe at the crime scene. A second match had been made of Murphy’s DNA and DNA found on a piece of human skin tissue found on the gallery carpet. And, though Murphy had not confessed to killing Joyce Wishart, he did admit being in Sarasota at the time of the murder. The affidavit noted that the FDLE forensic DNA analyst responsible for matching the samples was Suzanna Ulery.

  The first thing a person noticed about circuit judge Andrew Owens was that he was tall. Six-foot-seven. And, back in the late 1960s, he averaged twenty-seven points per game as the star forward for the University of Florida basketball team.

  Instead of taking a crack at pro basketball, he went to the University of Florida College of Law, and received his J.D. in 1972. His first job as a lawyer was with a law firm in Punta Gorda called Farr, Farr, Haymans, Mosely and Emerich.

  From there, he worked for a short time with a law firm in Sarasota before being appointed to the bench in 1982 by Florida’s then-governor Bob Graham. He filled a newly created judgeship in the Twelfth Circuit, which is a position he has held ever since.

  He overcame some rough times during his firs
t few years as a judge. He presided over felony criminal trials and was publicly criticized by defense attorneys because he participated with law enforcement in several undercover drug buys.

  In June 1985, a manslaughter conviction in his courtroom was overturned by an appellate court. The case involved a woman who stabbed her boyfriend to death during a fight and was sentenced to five years in prison. The appellate court ruled that Judge Owens had read an incorrect definition of self-defense during jury instructions—and the woman’s prison term was reduced to three years.

  During his time on the bench, Judge Owens moved around from division to division in an attempt to avoid burnout, and had presided over civil, criminal, and juvenile trials. During that time he helped develop drug and mental-health programs that offered people treatment rather than jail time for minor crimes.

  Presented with the evidence against Elton Brutus Murphy, Judge Owens signed the arrest warrant for murder.

  While this was going on, Murphy picked at scabs in his one-man confinement cell. Two weeks after his interview with Detectives Grant and Opitz, Murphy decided to end his own life.

  “I cut open my mattress with a razor blade. I peeled back the top of it so that my blood would drain into the stuffing of the mattress,” Murphy said.

  Murphy cut his left thigh, creating a nine-inch gash. It was so deep that it went almost to the bone.

  “I was hoping to cut my femoral artery, but I just missed it,” he said. He stopped cutting. He thought he might survive, but lose his leg. That frightened him into stopping. In order to stop the bleeding, he stuffed pages from a newspaper into the gash.

  A couple of days later, Murphy was moved to Huntsville Unit in Texas. When he arrived, he was strip-searched.

  The guard looked at Murphy’s leg, saw the newspaper stuffed into the gash, and said, “What the hell did you do to your leg?”

  Murphy was rushed to the prison doctor, who had to cut away half a pound of infected flesh before he could sew up the leg. Twenty-nine stitches were needed to close the wound.