Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  The jury room was theirs. No one who was not a juror could be allowed inside ever. Some people worried about surveillance cameras. There were none in there, he could assure them. It was time for them to retire to their duty and return a verdict. The jury solemnly filed out the nearby door.

  They were assured utter privacy. When it was over, those who chose to identify themselves to the press and make statements had every right to do so, as did those who wanted to remain anonymous and wished to return home the instant the verdict was read.

  That jury deliberated only one hour before returning with a guilty verdict.

  At the subsequent sentencing hearing, Murphy noticed something missing in the courtroom. The usual people were all in their places, but there was no Mark Klothacus. Murphy’s former best man attended the entire trial, but he would not be there for the sentencing.

  Murphy didn’t like to think that his friend might have given up on him. Later, Murphy noted that the sentencing hearing was very brief. Mark wasn’t always the most punctual guy. Maybe he’d simply missed it.

  At that brief hearing, Elton Brutus Murphy was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. If he had been found not guilty because of insanity, a second hearing would have been held to determine if Murphy should be committed to a mental hospital, given outpatient treatment, or released. But that was a moot point now.

  Only once had the trial gone late into the afternoon, so late that Carolyn Schlemmer had to return to her full-time job as a mother, and in that case Meisner took charge of the defense seamlessly.

  Murphy recalled, “Even though we lost the trial, I told both Schlemmer and Meisner that I was pleased with their performance and I thought they had done their best.”

  ASA Lon Arend thought that despite his victory the Murphy trial had raised an issue. It was a shame that Florida did not allow a verdict of “guilty but insane.”

  “Under the law,” he explained, “you are either sane, and you are convicted and go to prison, or you are insane, and you go to a hospital. Which means that the second you are deemed cured, you can be released and would be free to repeat a violent crime. If Elton Murphy had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, this very, very dangerous person, who had committed the most heinous of crimes, might have spent five years in a mental hospital and then been released.”

  That was especially true, Arend noted, because of the budget cuts of recent years and the closing of several state mental hospitals.

  Arend said, “There are some states and some countries that have this other verdict, guilty but insane, which would then allow the defendant to be sent to a mental hospital for the rest of his or her life.” In that system mentally ill killers could receive the treatment they needed, but society didn’t have to worry about them being released back into the population. “I think the fact that we did not have that option is too bad,” Arend concluded, “because that’s what I believe it would have been.”

  Chapter 40

  Cannibal Killers and Art World Murders

  Because of the research efforts involving this book, we now know more about Elton Brutus Murphy’s behavior than did the principals at his murder trial. Though Murphy still will not address the subject, there were elements of his behavior on January 16, 2004, that smacked of cannibalism.

  Murphy says he stole Joyce Wishart’s vagina and put it in his rooming house’s freezer to keep as a souvenir, but his acts mimic those of men who have dabbled in eating human flesh. And we do know that at least on one occasion during that time period, Murphy cooked stew and shared it with another man living in the boardinghouse. According to Murphy, the stew was made of “boiled pork” and he admitted that it was the only time he cooked a meal while living at that address. (Incidentally, he also admitted to tasting the vagina while it was still attached to the victim’s lifeless body.) Even if Murphy didn’t put some of Joyce Wishart into his stew, who is to say that while he sat in his Shade Avenue room, cutting up the vagina into little pieces that fell onto a paper plate and paper towel, that more tasting did not occur?

  It is no longer considered rare for murderers to cannibalize their victims. There is a theory that killers believe, as do some primitive cannibal tribes, that consuming human flesh releases black magic that can, in turn, provide the killer with tremendous power—that a “life force” can be consumed, as well as the flesh. Considering Murphy’s belief system, this notion must have appealed to him.

  Belief and execution of cannibalism go back to the very prototype of the modern psycho killer, to “Jack the Ripper,” who, in 1888, murdered and claimed to have eaten parts of at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel section of London.

  Murphy did not steal just any body part. He took his victim’s vagina. Necrophilia and cannibalism have been known to go hand in hand. The serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed at least fifteen male victims in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the 1980s, performed sexual acts upon and ate parts of his victims. When he was arrested, body parts were found in his refrigerator and freezer, being kept fresh for future consumption.

  The most famous of the recent cannibal killers was Arthur Shawcross, “the Genesee River Killer,” who killed at least twelve women in and around Rochester, New York—primarily prostitutes—during 1988 and 1989. The bodies were found, usually in an advanced state of decomposition, with various sex organs removed. He was arrested in January 1990 after aerial surveillance caught him masturbating at one of his dump sites. While he was in custody, Shawcross claimed to have eaten parts of three of his victims. He said that he became aware of his desire to consume human flesh only after he accidentally ate the nipple of one victim. During interrogation by a psychiatrist, Shawcross switched to a woman’s high-pitched voice and claimed he had once been a cannibal in medieval England.

  Long a staple of murder-mystery fiction and board games, murders in the art world are very rare, but not unheard of. Perhaps the most famous one was the 1985 murder of twenty-six-year-old Eigil Dag Vesti, a Norwegian male model and Fashion Institute of Technology student, on an estate in New York’s Rockland County.

  The victim was found shot twice in the back of the head, wearing only a leather mask. The murder was committed by twenty-two-year-old Bernard J.

  LeGeros, whose father owned the estate that was the crime scene, and who worked at the Andrew Crispo Art Gallery in Manhattan.

  The murder weapon was recovered in the Crispo gallery.

  The story became headline news and the subject of a best-selling book because it revealed a dangerous sadomasochistic sexual lifestyle among the Big Apple’s cultural elite.

  Crispo had a rags-to-riches bio, having started out as an abused child in a Philadelphia orphanage, and working his way into New York’s high society. Among his friends was Deborah Harry, lead singer of the pop band Blondie. He developed a serious cocaine habit and a bizarre, sadistic homosexual lifestyle. Among his assistant LeGeros’s duties were the picking up of men for his boss to abuse and then the disposal of them after his boss was through.

  One such sex slave was Vesti, who was bound and beaten by Crispo before LeGeros “took him for a ride.” Causing somewhat of a furor, LeGeros alone took the rap for Vesti’s murder.

  In January 2011, thirty-one-year-old Tajeme Sylvester, a master carpenter, was found murdered—shot twice, once in the head, once in the torso—inside the psychedelic Lotus Temple of Visions Gallery in Brooklyn, a gallery that the victim had been renovating. Police recovered nine-millimeter casings at the scene, but no firearm. The gallery existed to “promote all facets of conscious or cultural visual and living art expressions.” Neighbors, who said the gallery had a reputation as a crash pad for traveling artists, heard gunshots in the early evening. There were no signs of forced entry. After hours, the victim was a fixture on the party circuit, dancing to house music. He had also been an activist for environmentalism and holistic health. The gallery’s owner—Divine Elohim, a self-described “Space Age herbalist”—was out of town wh
en the murder occurred, and the case remained a mystery.

  Afterword:

  A God Has Become Man

  As autumn approached in 2011, Elton Brutus Murphy was the most polite murderer ever. He never failed to thank the author for the supplies he sent, or for the attention he gave.

  “It’s been a privilege and an honor working with you. Do you already have another murderer lined up for your next book?” he asked.

  The answer was no. The author’s next investigation was to be a reexamination of an icy cold case, a double sex murder near the author’s home when he was a child.

  Murphy said he was doing well. “Considering where I am,” he added, which was the Northwest Florida Reception Center prison facility in Chipley.

  Murphy had a reason to feel good. After more than a year in prison, he’d received his first visitor, his seventy-two-year-old aunt, Thelma Prance, from Cartersville, Georgia—his father’s sister.

  She had not been around much when Murphy was a boy and asked him to fill in the blanks for her. What was her brother—dead now for more than twenty years—like at that time?

  Murphy told her that his dad beat his mom and “aspirated on a severe drunk.”

  Murphy’s time went through a rough patch in 2010 when, after years of taking the same antianxiety, depression, and psychosis drugs, he began to have bad side effects. But eventually his meds were changed and the side effects smoothed out.

  Murphy still thought in terms of how much better society would be if he were within it rather than outside it. He could be a teacher. During his life he had taught an amazing three subjects: photography, scuba diving, and hairstyling.

  Some people complained of stage fright and dreaded situations where they had to speak in front of groups, but not Murphy.

  “I’m comfortable,” Murphy said, “as long as I know the subject matter reasonably well.”

  Murphy thought it was funny, but his best friends in prison were all bank robbers. He’d always been drawn to bank robbers, all the way back to his days in the general population in the Texas jail. All of the bank robbers he’d befriended had one thing in common: the guts to do it.

  “When I was free, I was successful at stealing small amounts of money. I never once contemplated robbing a bank,” Murphy said. He recalled a day twelve years past, when he was cutting hair in a Regis shop, and one of his favorite customers came in and told him that her boyfriend just got arrested for robbing a bank. Maybe being a bank robber was a destiny that had gone unfulfilled, Murphy realized with a sigh.

  After a lifetime of being in near-peak physical condition, Murphy, at age fifty-four, was letting himself go for the first time ever. “I simply can’t exercise to the extent that I used to,” Murphy said. He injured both of his arms a while back and this hindered his ability to exercise. The guy who once did eighteen hundred push-ups in one day, while in the Leon County Jail, now could do none. When the injury occurred, it felt like the bones in his upper arms had cracked. His arms never healed, never got back to anywhere near what they used to be.

  “Now I mainly walk for exercise,” he said.

  Regrets? He had one. He hadn’t raised his children in a Christian home. He’d never taught them about Jesus or taken them to church and Sunday school.

  Other than that, no, not really. He was satisfied with the way his life had turned out: “I’ve lived a full life and I’ve had many unique experiences,” he said happily.

  He was thankful that he’d gotten away with so much before he was finally caught and put away. True, he had to pay the piper for going AWOL; but other than that, he’d gotten away with a lot—and without consequences.

  Murphy now believed that the seed had been in him for a long time, that he was destined to do something very, very bad—and he had.

  “The seed was there, but I didn’t nourish it.” But he could only keep Mr. Hyde caged in Dr. Jekyll’s psyche for so long. Something had to give. “If I’d nourished it, I probably would have become a serial killer.”

  He would admit it now. When he did finally kill, it was such a rush. Big-time thrill. And it stayed in his mind vividly, like a movie that he could play for himself inside his head, again and again.

  “After the kill, during my time in the Texas state jail, all I thought about and planned for was my next kill. I was hooked on murder. I was a murder junkie,” he said. “I tried it one time and I was destined to do it again and again, until I was stopped.”

  He felt absolutely no remorse for the kill. No guilt! To this day he still felt no remorse for the murder and mutilation of Joyce Wishart.

  “I do, however, have feelings for the family,” Murphy quickly added. He remembered them in his daily prayers.

  “I also have regrets about not putting my own family first when planning the murder.” He hadn’t completely thought through the possibility that he could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was sorry for the hardship and pain his act caused Dean, and ex-wife Paula and the kids. “I neglected my own family in pursuit of pleasure,” he said, “even though the murder was a result of my extreme schizophrenic promptings.

  “During the act there was extreme pleasure,” he said, but that didn’t change the fact that the murder was a manifestation of his “complete psychological breakdown.”

  He did feel like there was injustice in his spending his remaining years in prison. What should have happened was he should have been committed to Chattahoochee for a few years, give the shrinks a chance to get his meds right so that sanity returned, and then he’d be good to go.

  Murphy knew his own mind better than anyone else would, and he could vouch for the fact that he’d been “normal” since 2008. No hallucinations, no paranoia, no grandiose feelings of being God. All of that was before 2008.

  Prison, however, was his destiny. If nothing else, he’d become a man of routine—a man who lived life at a lackadaisical pace, day after day, week after week, all very much the same.

  He woke up at four-thirty in the morning when the lights went on, shaved, brushed his teeth, and prayed for his extended family and others. After prayer he read the Bible, two to four pages, which always offered him pleasure and comfort. On April 18, 2011, he completed reading the entire Bible for the first time. He immediately went back to Genesis and started reading again.

  Just like the days, he would repeat.

  Sometime between five-thirty and seven in the morning, no set time, he went to breakfast. After that meal they had “first count,” to make sure all inmates were present and accounted for.

  After first count Murphy cleaned his cell, every day—took him about fifteen minutes. “Then comes what I like to call ‘my time,’” he said. He usually read, maybe a novel. He read several times throughout the day between the counts and the meals.

  Occasionally he had to work. His job was called “inside grounds.” He walked around the grounds and picked up trash. (Ironic, right?) And he pulled weeds. On the days that he worked, he finished up around 2:00 P.M.

  He went to the prison library once a week and picked out three books. Another once-a-week activity was recreation. “All I ever do is walk four miles around a huge dirt track,” Murphy said.

  Group Bible-study meetings were twice a week, and lasted about forty-five minutes apiece. Every once in a while he got to go to the chapel for a concert. The most recent concert was by Young Isaac, a coed sextet of college students. They were very good.

  “I lead a very quiet, reserved, most-of-the-time peaceful life—considering I’m in prison,” Murphy said, but he added, “There is a lot of noise and sometimes not-so-peaceful things happen around me.”

  He said he lived a Christian life, “as much as my personality will allow. And, believe it or not, I am content.”

  His contentment had nothing to do with the quality of the prison he was in. The inmates all claimed that the Northwest Florida Reception Center was the worst prison, and Murphy was inclined to agree. He was more content than the others for the simple reason
that, no matter what the situation was, he could make the most of it. That wasn’t true of a lot of guys. Take his best friend, for example. He’d been in this prison for about six months. He’d been in plenty of prisons, he said, and this one was the worst. “The prison is really starting to get to him,” Murphy said, “and his mood has been a downward spiral ever since he arrived.”

  Murphy liked to play devil’s advocate when it came to the worst-prison argument: “At least here, the officers don’t carry clubs like they did in Texas,” he would say. In Texas, Murphy had had a cell mate who one day threw water on an officer. A few minutes later the officer returned and took the guy out of the cell. Thirty minutes later, when the water thrower was returned, he’d been severely beaten: big knots on his head, eye and mouth busted open.

  Murphy didn’t have any groupies, but he wouldn’t mind a few. Back when he was in county jail, he’d had four women at once who wanted to be his pen pal. But he was so psychologically screwed up at that point that he couldn’t appreciate how much those women could have helped him combat his loneliness. He had refused to write them back. He wished he had that many women who wanted to be pen pals with him now, but no such luck.

  If Hollywood made a movie of his life, who would star in the picture? “Keanu Reeves or Russell Crowe as me,” Murphy said. “Katy Perry could play the girl I almost kidnapped—but she would have to put some blond highlights in her hair. And Demi Moore as Paula, the mother of my children.”