Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  “I still have a huge scar on my leg as a reminder,” Murphy said years later.

  In September, police located Murphy’s ex-girlfriend, Jane Wingate, who had remarried and now had a new surname. She remembered, just as he had, that Murphy tried to turn her into a swinger, but she declined.

  She told police that he’d confessed to perverse acts as a young man, and that he loved his sharp barber tools. By the time they broke up, all he ever did was weld things together.

  Before he lived with Jane Wingate and her seventeen-year-old daughter, he lived with his mother.

  In October, Murphy was removed from Huntsville Unit and extradited to Sarasota, Florida, to face the music. This process sounds like something that should have taken a day. But the truth was he was in transit between the facilities for three days.

  He was put on a bus, where he was handcuffed and shackled. The bus stopped at many jails and prisons, picking up prisoners and dropping prisoners off. They spent the night at various prisons and jails en route.

  Murphy’s new home was the Sarasota County Jail, where he was charged with the crime of murder and was put into a cell. He arrived in Sarasota in the middle of the night; the next morning he was again handcuffed and shackled and taken across the street to the interrogation room at the SPD. This room had a big mirror, and he assumed that he was being both observed and recorded.

  Detective Grant was again asking the questions. This time Grant tried to come off like he was Murphy’s buddy, and Murphy played along.

  Grant said they were going to take Murphy for a ride. He wanted the prisoner to visit downtown Sarasota and point out the places where he’d been—such as the gallery where he was trying to sell his work, as well as the coffee place and bookstore on the corner. Murphy said he would be glad to do that if they’d just loosen one ankle cuff, which was bothering him. Murphy said, “My one ankle’s swelled up a bit. That’s why it needs to be loosened. Ahh, that feels better.”

  Murphy got into an unmarked car with Grant and another officer. They drove him right past the Provenance Gallery so they could see his reaction.

  “I just ignored it,” Murphy recalled. After the ride he was returned to his cell.

  On October 30, 2004, public defender Adam Tebrugge wrote a letter to SPD chief Peter J. Abbott officially informing him that he had been appointed to represent Murphy.

  Please consider this letter to require no further contact between my client and anyone employed at your office, Tebrugge wrote.

  Tebrugge came to visit Murphy. Murphy liked him. The public defender was lean and tall, with slightly graying hair. Murphy figured he and the lawyer were about the same age, maybe a difference of five years, tops.

  “He told me at our first meeting that he didn’t want me to think of him as just a guy from the public defender’s office. He said, ‘Think of me as your private lawyer, and that you retained me for sixty thousand dollars. I will do just as good of a job and put forth just as much effort as if you had paid me all of that money.’”

  Tebrugge immediately had Murphy sign an invocation of rights affidavit, instructing authorities that Murphy should no longer be questioned without his lawyer present.

  Murphy would be represented well. Tebrugge, an attorney since 1985, was an anti–death penalty activist who frequently argued in public, often at Catholic Church gatherings, that life in prison was a superior, and more just, punishment—even for the worst of the worst. People thought that the death penalty saved taxpayers money because it was cheaper to kill a prisoner than to keep him incarcerated for life. But this was not the case. In fact, the opposite was true.

  Tebrugge used the example of Joseph P. Smith, the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered eleven-year-old Carlie Brucia. If the state had not tried (and succeeded) to get the death penalty in that case, there would have been no trial. Smith would have pleaded guilty, been sentenced to life in prison, no chance for parole, and that would have been that. Because the legal process between sentencing and the carrying out of the death penalty was so time-consuming and complex, costs to the taxpayer exceeded those of keeping a man in prison. Tebrugge argued that the criminal justice system would be better served by allocating resources to help victims and their families through counseling and other support.

  Murphy liked the guy.

  “After I was there only a few weeks, they moved me into an adjustment cell,” Murphy said. The cell was also referred to as “confinement” or “the Box.” The official reason for the transfer was “administrative.” His new home was a tiny one-man enclosure furnished with a stainless-steel combination sink/ toilet and a steel bunk. That miniature room would be his for many months. That’s a lot of scab picking.

  “During that time I was alone with my mind twenty-four hours a day,” Murphy said. Not a nice place to be. In this fervid, claustrophobic ambiance, Murphy’s delusions were malignant, growing and multiplying.

  The only way he could tamp down the delusions was by reading a book. It helped to replace the narrative in his head with another. If an author was good, he could shout down the voices in Murphy’s head.

  Every waking hour during those long days and weeks was a descending trip through a “self-imposed spiritual nightmare.” Over those weeks he formulated a new makeshift philosophy, an attempt to answer unanswerable questions.

  “I figured out the process necessary to make everything work,” Murphy said. The system involved replacing souls—removing the soul from a human being and replacing it with a completely different soul.

  He had the power to pull the soul out and plug in the new. It wasn’t just a quick switch. It was complicated. Sometimes it took hours, sometimes days. The new soul had to go through an intensive program of “disciplined indoctrination” in order to properly accomplish “transformation and renewal.”

  He saw spirits and souls as physical entities. They were objects and existed in all living things. Since he was made out of time, he performed the soul renewal process with “everyone I could think of.”

  The disciplined soul program resembled in some ways the ordeal a candidate must endure to become a Navy SEAL. Murphy perhaps understood the similarity, once referring to soul refurbishment as “virtual boot camp.”

  The process did not always go as planned. With something that complex, there was always the possibility of something going awry. “Sometimes souls and spirits from different living entities would merge, to form a new solitary soul,” Murphy explained. “The renovated souls sometimes flew back into the body that they came from. Sometimes they switched bodies.”

  Because of the complexity of the transferences, Murphy needed complete concentration—vivid and relentless visualization. And that was what kept him busy during his months in the Sarasota County Jail.

  At least, that’s Murphy’s version. Jail records indicate Murphy was not being a good boy. At one point he was on the receiving end of a stun gun, held down by a couple of deputies and stunned repeatedly on the backs of his legs.

  Hurt like hell, Murphy recalled. But, he claimed, he was not incapacitated. They also pepper-sprayed him. It wasn’t gross police brutality. Murphy admitted that he deserved the treatment, for he had just attacked a deputy with a mop bucket wringer.

  Murphy offered as an explanation that anyone would be cranky, given the circumstances. He had endured months with no window, no TV, no radio. He only left the cell for twenty minutes a day to walk down the hall to a shower. The leg wound still looked nasty.

  As he was taking the stun gun, trying to show heart, he recalled the time, three years earlier, when he had owned and used a stun gun. He knew the one that got him on the legs was top quality, leaving a huge welt each time it struck, probably tons more powerful than his own. He felt he could testify to the weapon’s ineffectiveness. Stun guns were useless. Now a Taser, on the other hand, was very effective. He’d seen them used in the jail a few times, and he was impressed. They would knock a grown man to the ground and, yes, incapacitate him.

 
; On November 10, 2004, Detective Glover received word that an African-American inmate named James Franklin, doing a seven-month stretch in the Sarasota County Jail for selling cocaine, had something to say about Murphy. He claimed Murphy made several admissions to him regarding the murder of Joyce Wishart.

  Franklin said he’d been taking a shower when he met Murphy. The name was familiar and Murphy said he’d probably heard about his case on the news. Franklin made the connection.

  “I said to him, ‘You the man that killed the lady on Palm Street? At the art gallery.’ He said, ‘Yeah, they say I did that.’ I asked him why he did it. He said he didn’t mean to do it, but she had pissed him off. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.”

  Franklin recalled that Murphy liked to clean and spent a long time cleaning in front of Franklin’s cell. It creeped Franklin out, and he told Murphy to clean someplace else.

  According to the jailhouse snitch, Murphy replied, “Fuck you, nigger. I wish I could pluck your eyes and kill you the way I did that lady.”

  Later, Franklin saw some sketches Murphy had drawn: woman-like demons, one of a dead lady with her tongue hanging out. Murphy said he was drawing his nightmares, drawing the “shit I see every night.”

  Franklin said Murphy told him he’d been in a Texas jail since February. Franklin asked him how he knew the lady in the art gallery. Murphy told him he “used to do odds-and-ends work for her, like handiwork or whatever.”

  Franklin apparently didn’t know about the stun gun incident. Franklin noticed that Murphy had marks on the backs of his legs. He asked how he’d gotten them. Murphy refused to answer, telling him he was asking too many questions, and adding that he’d “said too much already.”

  Murphy never said how he killed her or what she’d done to irritate him. After that, all he heard Murphy talk about was “being a hybrid, an alien.”

  Franklin said that on the day before, he had told Murphy that he hoped Sarasota gave him one hundred years. Murphy replied that he would kill Franklin if he got the chance.

  Chapter 37

  The Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy Speaks

  The investigation into Joyce Wishart’s murder and Murphy’s background continued for many months, although new info came now in dribs and drabs.

  During the spring of 2005, in compliance with the rules of discovery, Assistant State Attorney (ASA) Debra Johnes Riva officially authorized Murphy’s attorney, Adam Tebrugge, to make copies of all written and audio/video recordings pertaining to the case.

  By 2006, prosecutors were plenty pleased that the DNA match was so positive, because other elements of the case against Elton Brutus Murphy were not up to snuff. There were problems matching Murphy’s prints to those found at the crime scene.

  The grainy surveillance recordings of the front of the Provenance Gallery from the days and weeks after the murder were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Technology Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia.

  A man had come and looked in the front window. If a viewer were to judge from his size and shape, the man could have been Murphy, but there was little facial detail. The state attorney’s office sent a copy of the surveillance tape to the FBI, but the Feds rejected it, saying they would need the original in order to do their thing. The original was sent then, processed by Amanda Broyles, of the FBI; facial recognition, however, was still impossible. There was “insufficient image detail.”

  Murphy claimed that he never visited the scene of the crime; and despite modern science the prosecution would be unable to prove otherwise. Sergeant Jack Carter maintained that the man looking in the window was Stephen Garfield, the Bay Plaza security guard.

  During April 2006, the SPD’s Criminalistics Lab examined the items found in Murphy’s backpack when he was arrested in Houston. It was discovered that the keys Murphy had on him did not fit the Provenance’s lock. The purse Murphy had apparently stolen was checked inside and out for fingerprints, again with negative results.

  But, while fingerprints were getting the authorities nowhere, DNA matches kept coming. A second set of swabs and samples, originally confiscated by technician Valerie Howard, were now sent by Howard via FedEx to LabCorp. Though they already had enough to place Murphy at the scene of the murder, testing continued. The DNA found in blood samples from the interior lock and light switch of the art gallery matched that of Murphy’s DNA.

  Plus, blood found on the gallery’s fax machine by technician James Tutsock had a profile consistent with a mixture of Murphy’s and Wishart’s blood.

  So the physical evidence was both sparse and conclusive. This wasn’t going to boil down to whether or not Murphy did it. He did it, all right. But was he criminally insane when he did it? That was the question that needed to be answered.

  For months at a time, the presumption was that there would be no trial. The presumption was that Murphy would always be unfit to stand trial.

  The only time Murphy was allowed to get out of confinement for any length of time was when a shrink needed to talk with him. The state was trying to figure out how nuts he was, and if they needed to try him for murder—a big expense to the taxpayers that would be unnecessary if he was deemed criminally insane.

  The first shrink Murphy remembered speaking to was Dr. Wade C. Myers III, who was both a college professor and a forensic psychiatrist. He had an office in Tampa and had been a shrink for more than twenty years. “He was tall and had movie-star good looks,” Murphy said. He showed up wearing an Indiana Jones hat. Murphy told him about his powers.

  In his box Murphy built a noose and hung it from the vent in his ceiling. For three days he stared at it, “trying to build up the courage to use it.” Then a jail deputy saw it; that finally got Murphy some new digs. He was moved to a cell that had a deputy and a desk located right outside, so there would be someone keeping an eye on him twenty-four hours a day.

  On May 5, 11, and 19, 2006, Murphy was evaluated by Dr. Mary Elizabeth Kasper, who specialized in psychology and clinical psychology. She earned her degree in 1996 from the University of North Texas Health Science Center. He found her attractive and intelligent. She later recalled that she thought she and Murphy developed a “rapport.”

  Dr. Kasper later said, “I spent many, many hours interviewing him, as well as countless hours reviewing and memorizing his background. His case is an excellent study of a descent into madness.”

  The third mental-health professional to poke around Murphy’s screwed-up psyche was Dr. James McGovern, who found Murphy delusional and schizophrenic. Murphy liked Dr. McGovern’s military bearing, his crew cut, and neatly trimmed moustache.

  On July 31, 2006, Murphy’s barber’s license expired. He didn’t apply for a new one. He didn’t even know it had happened, locked as he was in a ward for violent mental cases.

  Murphy passed the time by trying to remember all of the girls he’d had sex with, in chronological order. There were many. He’d been quite the hound in his day. He didn’t remember all of their names, but he recalled more than sixty lovers.

  On August 4, 2006, the court hearing was held to determine if Murphy was competent to stand trial. Presiding over the hearing was tall Judge Owens.

  Murphy’s defense not only argued that Murphy shouldn’t go to trial, but if they did, that tapes of police interviews with the defendant should not be allowed in as evidence. Tebrugge filed a motion that argued that Murphy’s bizarre statements to police—while being interrogated by the police about the murder—were not admissible at any upcoming trial because they were irrelevant, and because they were made without Murphy understanding his rights.

  On those recordings Murphy could be heard to say: “What’s your choice, and Joyce rejoicing about? Are we rejoicing today as somebody’s heaven?”

  Judge Owens decided that the best way to judge a man’s mental capacity was to talk to him directly. He asked the defendant to state his name.

  “I am the Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy. The Joyce Wishart murder trial must not be delaye
d,” Murphy said. The courtroom attendees could hear the scratching noise as reporters simultaneously jotted down that quote.

  From the prosecution’s standpoint, however, the cause was not hopeless. Two psychologists who’d examined Murphy testified at the hearing that, given the proper medication and education, Murphy could be made competent to stand trial. Murphy, the psychologists noted, already understood the court system and was able to talk about it.

  Dr. James McGovern said Murphy understood how the court system worked for normal people. The problem was that Murphy did not consider himself a normal person. He believed he was godlike and therefore the rules of the court system did not apply to him.

  Dr. Mary Elizabeth Kasper testified that Murphy understood that if he was convicted of first-degree murder, he might be subject to the death penalty. This did not concern him, however, since he knew he could never be convicted. “He told me he had the power to control the people involved in the process,” Dr. Kasper testified, adding, “That is not rational.”

  In addition to the results of the exams by the two psychologists, Murphy’s mental history was taken into account: He had been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder before the murder; and at the time of his arrest, he had engaged in behavior that was characterized by the investigating detectives as “bizarre.”

  Judge Owens found Murphy incompetent to stand trial, despite the defendant’s protests. The judge ruled that Murphy lacked a rational understanding of the factors of the law.

  After Judge Owens’s ruling, Murphy was ordered to a state mental hospital in Chattahoochee, where attempts would be made to restore his mental capacity so he could stand trial.