“It isn’t any stranger than the 'Helter Skelter' theory,” Fontaine added, damming Carly’s theory with faint praise to everyone’s amusement.
The one fact, which did keep the skeptics involved, was the sexual assaults. Good Friday and the Stations of the Cross had nothing to do with sex. The sodomy and the rape of each victim were large stumbling blocks. The only explanation Carly could give was, “the killer was a ‘sicko’ Catholic boy, who was getting his jollies doing women to the tune of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ “. The motive, they could only guess at for now and hope to find out at some point later.
Everyone conceded they had until the first Friday of June to come up with the motive and the killer. Like the last two Stations, the next one involved two people. They faced the reality there could be yet another double murder. The corresponding Station was Jesus meeting Veronica as he carried the cross, when she wipes the sweat and blood from his face. The likelihood of the killer needing two victims again seemed quite possible, as he did not hesitate to kill as he needed in the previous two months.
While it wasn’t a motive unto itself, the ‘Stations of the Cross’ provided a framework in which the detectives could operate. The killer was or had been Catholic. They knew he was shorter than the average male, yet incredibly strong. He had a passing knowledge of, or at least access to, equipment used around livestock, and he had to be familiar with the LoDo area.
Dave Ramirez, Carly’s partner speculated on the facts at hand as the two of them shared a late Sunday supper, “He’s jockey or a groom or a trainer, Carly. I just know it.”
“What makes you say that?” Carly questioned, still feeling unsure about the killer and whom he might be. The activities which led up to the murder did not pigeonhole the murderer into any known category for him. He didn’t see this piece of the puzzle yet.
“Look at the facts. The guy is strong, very strong. Jockeys are strong despite their size. They have to be on a pound for pound basis, as they are manhandling a half ton of horsemeat out on the track. A lot of the time grooms and trainers had been jockey’s as well. They either got too old, weren’t good enough or had outgrown the position. Anyone who has to work with horses has to have some muscle. A lot of people in the horse racing business are Hispanic. Remember the Spaniards brought horses to this part of the country, their passion for the animal has not diminished over the years. LoDo’s a predominantly Spanish neighborhood now. Most Hispanics are Catholic. So it makes sense the killer is Hispanic.”
“So you are saying our man is Hispanic and works the horse racing business?”
“Exactly. Even the blood type and DNA evidence suggests a white male, which includes Hispanics. Throw in the ‘macho’ savageness of the killings and you have some link to the motive.”
“An FBI profiler might not agree. Not many serial killers are minorities. But a few were…enough to make the premise viable.”
The two men knew they were grasping at straws, but like Carly’s whole ‘Stations of the Cross’ scenario the befuddled detectives were ready to follow any lead. Starting the next day, they began working the local race track circuit that operated throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas and Oklahoma. In rotation, most of the racetracks ran a season consecutively with the next area, saving them from competing for good mounts and riders. The gamblers either drifted along with the action themselves as they followed the horses or bet the action in off-track parlors. A registry of jockeys was easy to find, while the grooms and trainers were harder to track as most were very migratory. Young and mobile they chased a job where ever they could. Being transient they weren’t in a place long enough to do anything in a systematic fashion, thus the deliberate and delayed action of serial murder seemed unlikely for them. More established and older trainers worked out of a particular stable, with none obviously in the downtown Denver area. In the group the detectives were able to locate, none were Hispanic. The jockey registry produced a number of Hispanic riders, but only two were listed as having lived in the Denver metro area. Neither of the two lived in the LoDo area, nor had they ever. Carly and Dave paid each a visit but had to discount them as suspects as both had proof they were riding out of state on various dates of the murders.
One of the detectives in Carly’s group decided to look at the rodeo circuit hoping someone might fit the profile they had conjured up. Most of the cowboys were Caucasians, with no particular tie-in to the Catholic Church and most had lived on ranches and farms far removed from the inner city. There were some who came from other states, but there were no rodeos in January and February which would have drawn them into Denver. While no one group was ruled out, the detectives continued to follow Dave’s supposition and concentrated on the Hispanic angle.
The pieces made sense to the puzzle; they just didn’t fit…yet.
Going back to the basics, Carly and Dave Ramirez decided to do a door-to-door investigation. Originally a door-to-door interview had been done in the immediate vicinity of each crime scene. That review had been solely for the purpose of trying to ferret out information to see if anyone had noticed any odd comings and goings at the time of the murders. The partners elected to follow a different track and interview the entire neighborhood about the murderer himself. They had hopes someone who might know a Hispanic man who had something to do with horses. It was a long shot and a lot of legwork, but the detectives didn’t have another strategy.
For Carly the interviews were an eye-opener. Not having grown up in the Denver area he didn’t know much about the downtown area itself. He found out LoDo was not entirely Hispanic, there was a recent influx of Asians, as there were a number of eastern Europeans living in and about the neighborhood. Most of them were senior citizens, hold outs from when the area had been mostly Polish, Romanian and Czech populated.
Many years before, the LoDo area had been the site of a couple of large slaughter houses and packing plants, bringing in the animals from the region’s ranches, stretching from Trinidad to the south, Cheyenne to the north and western Kansas on the prairie side. The type of hard labor needed for butchering and packing attracted a large number of European immigrants in the early 1920’s and continued on through the 1930’s and 1940’s especially as the Nazi’s drove people into a mass exodus from Europe. By the 1970’s, the population make up of LoDo began to shift as the second generation of these immigrants began moving to the suburbs. In the late 80’s the last packing plant closed its doors and moved north to Longmont. With its loss, the neighborhood slowly lost its European flavor. An exchange of residents occurred with new immigrants arriving from Mexico. Many Hispanics came to Denver fleeing the larger cities back east or the poverty of their homeland to the south, hoping for a fresh start in the Rocky Mountains working the manufacturing jobs Denver was developing. In decay, the LoDo area was an affordable option for them. By the early 1990’s the LoDo neighborhood was predominantly Hispanic. The remaining Poles, Romanians and Czech’s in the area were those few seniors who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave the homes of their youth.
As Carly learned more about the area he could in a sense see that the area had become a mini-barrio…lots of people, few jobs or any real opportunities. Crime was high. Drugs and gangs were prevalent everywhere. Families trying to make it there adopted the local Catholic parish St. Kashmir’s, and changed its name to Blood of Christ Church or as the parishioners called it, “Sangre de Cristo”.
Carly knew this transformation was typical of many urban areas. One group moves out, another moves in. The exchange seems to leave the neighborhood rootless for a while with the only given being the new occupants would be poorer than the last. The door-to-door interviews told Carly the killer was probably not Hispanic. The nature of these killings did not fit these people. If there was a killing in LoDo it was going to be an act of passion…a lover scorned…a deal betrayed…acts of anger done on the spur of the moment, perhaps a retaliatory gang hit. Killings done by these people were not a ritualistic sexual fantasy involving strangers. Carly cou
ld see the people living in LoDo were just trying to survive, when things went awry passions erupted quickly without forethought or planning.
As the first Friday of June rolled around, Carly and the others were still at ground zero. The hysteria continued in and around the city. The political pressure from above was enormous. When the next murder was discovered, they took small solace in the fact only one woman had been killed and not the two they had feared. The killing had been brutal in the extreme however. Seeing the body for the first time, Carly was taken aback just as he had when he saw the first victim. The ‘Veronica’ role was not played by the victim, but rather by the killer. He had wiped the victim’s face…. with acid. Her face had been burned away, while she was still alive. The last moments of her life before he mercifully snapped her neck had to have been tortuous in the extreme.
The murder had all the same nasty clues as the others. Sodomy and rape. Semen samples and tissue samples under the woman’s fingernails confirmed the same DNA, the same blood type, the same ethnicity, the same man. The woman’s hands were bound with the same hemp rope as used in all the previous killings. As usual the killing occurred on the first Friday of the month.
While Carly had ruled out a Hispanic as the killer, he could not rule out a Hispanic as the victim now. The woman in her early thirties was snatched from a shopping center parking lot the Wednesday before the murder. The killer perhaps feeling the intensity of awareness throughout the city as the first Friday of June approached, took the victim early. Evidence at the scene suggested the woman had not been kept there, so the killer again defying any sense of fear, had kept his victim somewhere else and brought her into LoDo to kill her.
The press vilified the police. The police, especially Carly, now actually felt powerless.
The police knowing the murder date was approaching in June had marshaled every available man to the LoDo area. Despite a hundred policemen in over forty patrol cars, numerous undercover cops wandering the streets, a dozen horse patrols, as well as ten officers on bikes the entire week, the killer got in and got out. What unnerved so many of them, was the fact the killer committed this murder in the same location as his first. The brazenness of his actions was shocking.
As Carly and his partner sat drinking coffee, bewildered as to how the killer could be so elusive, Carly admitted the killer had to know the area better than the police. Dave speculated, as did others in the department that the killer might actually be a cop.
“How else could someone get in and out like that?” he asked Carly wanting an answer to what seemed to be a rhetorical question. “It takes balls to do what he did!”
Carly had no answers and they both knew it, “We have a mastermind for a foe. Either that or he has a pact with the devil.”
“Even lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same place, how can this guy?”
“He knows LoDo. He knows it like the back of his hand,” Carly admitted almost begrudgingly. “He had to have spent time here. Lots of it. At some point in his life he was here. It’s not like he just worked here in one of the warehouses and went home to some other place in the city.”
Carly was feeling something, just like he had when he was in church, the sense of the pieces almost fitting, but not quite. The more he talked the more he felt a rush of awareness, as if the truth was around the next corner. He kept talking in a stream of consciousness. Dave had seen it before and he let his partner ramble, hoping the tall intense man across the table from him could put the pieces into the puzzle because up until that time, no one else had been able.
“You know how it is when you pass through an area every day? It’s familiar, but not really well known. It’s like walking up to your house from an angle you never have before. It’s familiar but it’s not right, not really familiar. The killer has seen LoDo from all the angles. He spent time here, lots of it, the kind of time someone spends living there. The killer had to have grown up in the area.”
Reminding him they had given up on a Hispanic identity, Dave still let Carly ramble on.
“Adults know their neighborhoods. They know the buildings, the streets, the people, even the alleyways. But kids know every nook and cranny of a neighborhood. They know the hidden passageways, the tunnels under the streets, the holes in the fences, the doors that don’t quite lock. They know rooftops and windows that are easy to reach. They develop short cuts and secret routes in and out of places. They know the crawl spaces. Kids see the soul of the neighborhood…they live it.”
Dave knew Carly was on to something.
Looking at his partner, Carly broke into a grin. “This guy grew up there, but not recently. He was there when the neighborhood wasn’t Hispanic! He was probably there twenty or thirty years ago, when the neighborhood was predominantly Polish, Czechoslovakian, or Romanian. He grew up there, he played there. He probably went to school and church at St. Kashmir’s. He might have moved away when the neighborhood started changing or maybe when he was old enough to work he left for the suburbs, but he was there. Every damn day of his life as a kid, crawling around the neighborhood, cutting through yards, playing hide and seek in the empty buildings. Our killer is a LoDo native! The killings might be his way of coming home.”
The best way to beat someone was to use their own strength against them. The killer’s trump card was his ability to get in and out of LoDo undetected. He knew too much about the area and downtown Denver as a whole. This was his strength and it led Carly to look at a different path from what the investigation had originally taken. With a vigor he had not felt since that May Sunday in church, Carly got out a map and plotted the sites of each abduction. Quickly the pattern unfolded before him as every woman had been kidnapped from a location within a block or two of Interstate 25 or the new bypass, the main north and south traffic arteries for the city. Anyone coming from the north could take either highway south and still find themselves heading to the LoDo area.
“He coming from the north,” Carly told his partner. “He comes down the interstates, makes his grab and presto he is in the LoDo area before the victim is even considered missing.
With Dave Ramirez in breathless pursuit, Carly strode from the office off to the LoDo area. This time he was going to do his door to door interviews with a different slant. He wasn’t looking to identify Hispanic residents and what they might know about the killings but rather he was going to interview the old European’s still living there. Perhaps one of them might just know one of their own who would have cause to do such atrocities.
Chapter Two
Las Angeles – Fifteen Years Later
Dr. Carlton Thompson hated to fly, as a lowly police detective he had hated it even more. Having enough money to fly first class still didn’t help. It wasn't that he was afraid to fly, he just hated it. At his height he never seemed to have enough head or legroom. He could barely move about within the interiors of the planes without stooping, without bumping his head or elbows or knees, or some part of his body somewhere. The bathrooms were a joke for a man his size. He found it nearly impossible to work productively, sleep soundly, or eat civilly with the constant jostling and interruptions. His only advantage in the world of commercial flight was the fact his lanky frame fit easily within the width of the narrow seats.
Carly also hated Los Angeles. Like his aversion to flying, it wasn't because he was afraid of Los Angeles. It wasn't a fear of the city, or its crime, or its smog, or its people. Like flying, he just found himself uncomfortable in L.A. Crowded amidst the throngs of people he felt squeezed. He found the traffic impossible to navigate in any type of reasonable time frame. The rapid pace of life, disguised by a pseudo laid back attitude, was nothing more than an agent of the aging process for him. Being in L.A. made him feel like he was dying a little faster than he should every time he was there. Coming from the crisp mountain air of northern Colorado, the smog attacked his sinus and left him feeling dirty. The tumultuous crowds overshadowed by the towering buildings left him longing for the wide-open spaces of
the high plains of the west. The breakneck pace towards tomorrow, made him ache for the true laid-back style of the Rocky Mountains.
Carly hated professional conventions. He had never been to one where he really learned anything new. He found the people in attendance filled with a well-mannered smugness, as though dressing well and rubbing their collective elbows together made them better than those people who weren't in attendance. A mutual admiration society, without benefit of admirable acts, he thought. Most topics presented were better understood in a journal, read within the safe confines of the bathtub at home, not in an endless narration before a stuffy room full of people whose only real interest was in the time remaining until the next break.
Considering how he felt about all these things, he found it hard to believe that within the last six hours he had managed to combine all three into one joyless trifecta of misery. Worse yet, he was late. Compulsively punctual, he would rather do most anything than be late. As if some self-fulfilling prophecy of doom accompanied him in his misery, Carlton Thompson found that a routine two-hour flight from Denver to Los Angeles, could easily become three hours flying through turbulence brought about by a stiff head wind, coupled with a late take-off and a seemingly endless holding pattern above the brown air of L.A., made the morning flight one more intolerable act of insensitivity. Having an actual landing at another airport to the south due to a ground emergency proved to be additionally excruciating. Finally, an extra half-hour cramped in an airline shuttle bus back to LAX became a veritable expedition into the uncomfortable. Complementing the horrors of an impatient man engaged in a despised task was another one-hour wait at the baggage carrousel while the flight's luggage caught up with the owners.
Had all things gone correctly, he would have easily been on time for the nine o'clock opening of the seminar, however as his luck would have it he was nearly two hours late. While he experienced many advantages in life due to his height, he found making an unseen entrance into a nine o'clock symposium at eleven o'clock was not one of them. He knew his late arrival would thrust him into a brief snippet of unwanted attention he so hated. Not that he hated attention, that would be impossible for an individual with such a strong ego, it was just he wanted it on his own terms. Waltzing into a seminar with three or four hundred of his contemporaries in attendance, two hours late, was not the ideal way to get attention, he thought to himself.
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