The Skeleton Crew

by Deborah Halber

  Matt Wingo’s companion, Kristy Gault, ran a website dedicated to unidentified and missing persons. Gault had traveled to Texas from Ohio partly to document the eerily deserted locations where the remains of Princess Blue and other possible victims of the notorious serial killer or killers had been found (she would later post on her site one of the photos she took that day) and partly to meet Wingo, who was as haunted by the deaths as she was.

  Investigators never agreed on how many killers were involved in the Texas slayings, the subject of several books and movies. Murders committed in the 1980s appeared to copycat the original 1970s crimes; one FBI profiler believed that as many as five or more murderers may have taken advantage of this boggy, desolate region of oil refineries within easy reach of megacities Dallas and Houston. There were so many Jane Does among the victims that police took to mounting their pictures on I-45 billboards.

  In his heyday as a detective, Matt Wingo had worked as many as three such homicides in one night. Now retired, he had never given up hope that Princess Blue and the other unidentified serial-killer victims would be identified and their murderers prosecuted.

  The baseball-cap cop looked at the pair, considering. He acknowledged that Wingo’s name rang a bell. Still, he told them he needed to run checks on both of them, and on Gault’s car. The Manvel police chief would later demand that Wingo stay out of his town for good. Wingo never for a moment considered halting his expeditions to the dumping grounds.

  * * *

  Kristy Gault, aka Miss Killjoy and Starless, avid gardener and reputed onetime exotic dancer, enlivened her daily posts to the bare-bones bulletin board she had founded, Cold Case Investigations (also called OCCI, for Official Cold Case Investigations, and later Cold Case Examiner), with a dizzying array of animated icons: twirling blue stars, dancing pink milk cartons with legs, leaping exclamation points, frenetic lightning strikes, buzzing bees trapped in jars. When I told her why I was calling, Gault revealed she was working on her own book, each chapter describing an unidentified body—some I had heard of, many I hadn’t. Gault had an uncanny memory for the unidentified. When I mentioned the Lady of the Dunes, she rattled off the particulars as though she’d just seen the police report. She seemed happy to chat with a like-minded caller; she confided that the uninitiated often found her pursuit a bit off-putting.

  Gault told me that while she was growing up in Barberton, Ohio, her mother, a true-crime buff, had dragged her to see serial murderers on TV the way some kids might be plopped in front of the Disney Channel. “See that man?” her mother would say, pointing to a handsome face on the screen with wavy dark hair and intense eyes. “That’s Ted Bundy.”

  Gault first encountered Wingo on Websleuths.com. Users weren’t allowed to contact other users directly, and Gault felt constricted by the site’s rules. She also wasn’t permitted to contact people in connection with investigating crimes, which is what she most liked to do. Still, she continued to post on Websleuths until Wingo—in one of their very first interactions—publicly took her to task for an error he perceived in one of her posts. He also used her screen name to “yell at” everyone on the site, she recalled. The site administrator banned them both. But Gault and Wingo stayed in touch, and Gault went to Texas in 2007 to meet him. She ended up moving in with him while she continued to beef up OCCI.

  Gault and Wingo were anomalies in the world of web sleuthing, equally involved in real-life investigations as in posting details of cold cases online. Gault claimed to “officially” solve one case and help close the books on six others by unearthing and passing along tips to police.

  For a time, Gault was obsessed with the bizarre case of Florida death row inmate Franklin Delano Floyd, who allegedly kidnapped a four-year-old girl, raised her as his daughter, and later married her. The young woman died in 1990 in a hit-and-run accident that may have been tied to Floyd, who was convicted in 2002 of murdering another woman. Gault corresponded with Floyd for four years and contacted members of his family in an attempt to uncover details about his victims, finally giving up when Floyd started asking her for money.

  Besides looking into whether a Galveston prostitute named Brenda Diamonte might be a possible match for Princess Blue, Gault hoped to unearth evidence that would support the theory, which both she and Wingo adhered to, that Roy Alan Stuart, a suspect in four murders and nine sexual assaults since 1964, was involved in the Princess Blue murder. That day, the pair photographed deserted roadside sites where Stuart, imprisoned for aggravated kidnapping, was suspected to have dumped other victims.

  Matt Wingo’s association with OCCI likely boosted the forum’s credibility in the web-sleuthing world, particularly in Houston, where Wingo’s father, Cecil, was a local legend. At age twenty-three, Cecil Wingo became the first and youngest police chief of Angleton, Texas, and spent part of his ensuing decades-long career in law enforcement with ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, where he helped profile serial killers Ted Bundy and Carl Eugene Watts, aka the Sunday Morning Slasher. Cecil Wingo also served as chief investigator under the famed Joseph “Dr. Joe” Jachimczyk. Houston’s first and longest-serving chief medical examiner, Dr. Joe, who studied both law and theology before pursuing a medical degree, spent thirty-five years “sorting out the grim results of the city’s violence,” as his obituary put it, before he retired in 1995.

  Cecil Wingo and Dr. Joe may have ignited Matt Wingo’s compassion for the unidentified in 1984 when they hosted a funeral service for a headless, legless, and handless torso twenty years after it was found in Fort Bend County. Dr. Joe had held on to the remains in the unfulfilled hope that the victim would one day get back a name.

  So for Cecil Wingo’s only son to be detained by a wet-behind-the-ears cop at the Princess Blue dump site was humiliating and infuriating. Despite being retired from the county sheriff and district attorney offices, Wingo was still following up on leads for some of the bodies he helped recover in the 1980s, when he scoured the county’s dark, lonely roads for the bodies of girls and women abducted from Houston.

  Wingo told me that, unlike websites that harbored idle speculation (a faintly veiled dig at Porchlight and Websleuths), Gault’s Official Cold Case Investigations was the only web-sleuthing crime forum that did any “real work.” By 2007, OCCI had gained a reputation as a serious forum, devoid of the drama that plagued some other sites. But shortly afterward it experienced its own brouhaha.

  One day, Gault and Wingo logged on and saw the word “PORCHLIGHT” swallow up their screen. Someone calling himself or herself luv­mycat had infiltrated the inner workings of OCCI and doctored Gault’s and Wingo’s passwords, effectively locking them out of their own site. Wingo fumed about “all the fruitcakes out there” sabotaging the self-­respecting web sleuths like Gault and himself, but he had no immediate recourse except to patch up the damage to the site and to his ego.

  Wingo was certain he knew who was behind the hack.

  * * *

  I had arrived at Lauran Halleck’s house in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina, with dusk approaching.

  Halleck shooed aside the two yippy dogs and opened the door, an apple in her hand. One of the cats followed us to the fenced-in field where she fed the pony. She had taken in the lame creature, and an old mare, and the dogs, and some of the cats, when their owners could find no other homes for them.

  Inside the house, a nineteenth-century hand-carved carousel horse, a beautiful antique in faded burgundy and forest green, stood alongside open sacks of dog food and general dust-covered clutter. There was more of Halleck’s painted glassware: she presented me with a round Christmas ornament covered in pansies. A disheveled kitten mewed feebly from a box on the kitchen table. “Come on,” Halleck said, poking a bit of shredded meat at its mouth. “Take it.” The kitten didn’t respond to the food; its head lolled alarmingly to the side. In an adjacent room an open jar of peanut butter sat on a shelf, knife protruding, and a cup of tea had
grown cold next to the keyboard of an ancient desktop PC. A hard drive as big as a milk crate sat next to it. I figured the hard drive was up on the desk instead of the floor because of Ozzie.

  Halleck had seemed hesitant to invite me into this room. With the door shut behind us, I saw why. A lanky, coyote-like creature—a feral dog, she informed me—crouched under the desk, looking antsy. Next to the bed, a chestnut-brown mastiff staggered to its dinner-plate-sized paws.

  Ozzie leaned against me affectionately, all 220 pounds of him pinning my midsection between his rib cage and the frame of a water bed jacked high off the floor to prevent him from leaping on it and collapsing it. He stood patiently, one enormous paw on my left foot, wheezing asthmatically through pendulous jowls. Ozzie was someone’s castoff, the most recent in Halleck’s long succession of mastiffs. She said that at one time she owned six of the giants. One was Monkalup, Halleck’s most-used screen moniker.

  We sat in front of the computer. Ozzie, seeking an ear rub, lugubriously swiped a paw at me, a habit he had picked up from his former owner’s pit bulls. It was like being hit with a barbell. Halleck, raspy-voiced from years of smoking, reprimanded him in baby talk. He settled his toaster-sized muzzle on my lap, gazing up at me with one rheumy brown eye while a puddle of drool spread on my thigh. The objects on the desk shook and rattled with his breathing, as though experiencing a minor earthquake.

  With a few clicks Halleck raised Porchlight on the screen. Besides her search for Jean Marie, the main reason she joined the Doe Network in 2000 soon after its creation and then founded her own public database for the missing and unidentified was because so much information was vanishing from the Web.

  Halleck viewed the Internet as an ideal communication and information-­gathering tool. Except it wasn’t reliable. Articles, data, entire sites emerged and then disappeared in a poof of ether. So Halleck started Porchlight, initially, as a repository. Some used it to try to make matches between the missing and unidentified, aided by message boards and forums consisting of every article, every mention, every bit of information users could dig out about a given case. Others stuck to bolstering the growing database. Members of law enforcement had been known to call and write Halleck, she said, thanking her for background case material more comprehensive than what they had in their own files.

  With the help of a computer whiz named Carl, Halleck said she aimed to make Porchlight the most searchable, sortable, and intuitive database on the Web. But Porchlight might never have existed if Halleck hadn’t been banned from the Doe Network in the first place.

  * * *

  At the base of Halleck’s differences with the Doe Network was a philosophical rift in the web sleuth world between two camps I’ll call the mavericks and the trust builders. The mavericks want to contact law enforcement directly. They want to take their gold nugget of a possible match directly to the cops. They want recognition—glory, as it were—for finding the Holy Grail: a positive identification.

  The trust builders are more team-oriented. They hope to build a reputation as responsible, behind-the-scenes helpmates to law enforcement. In the mid-2000s, a handful of cops, detectives, and coroners did begin to recognize that the web sleuths could be useful, especially for very cold cases. They started to share bits of information. The web sleuths, for the most part, took this responsibility seriously. They believed that if they didn’t violate trust, they’d get more tidbits—autopsy details or a picture of a piece of jewelry discovered with a body—that could facilitate matches. Law enforcement had supplied some of this information confidentially; if they learned of breaches, Doe administrators contended, the Doe Network and others like them would lose credibility.

  For this reason, the Doe Network administrative board started to require members to submit all matches to the potential match (PM) panel, an elite committee that determined which matches looked promising enough to forward to law enforcement. The board felt this protected law enforcement from the type of pushy, time-sucking web sleuths whom certain cops had dubbed the Doe Nuts. (Yet, even rule-abiding web sleuths have at times considered the PM panel stifling and needlessly bureaucratic. Some have become incensed when, on occasion, the panel refused to forward matches that later turned out to be accurate. Others told me “gut instincts” convinced them of certain matches despite lack of definitive evidence.)

  In 2006, Lauran Halleck was an administrator for the Doe Network, having worked her way up the ranks over the previous six years. Doe Network members claimed the real reason that Halleck was ousted that year was because she was a maverick. She reportedly gave another member—also subsequently banned—access to behind-the-scenes, “privileged” information from law enforcement. She insisted to me that this never happened. Still peeved six years after her banishment, Halleck maintained that the Doe Network kicked her out for contacting law enforcement outside her designated geographic area. (A Doe administrator confirmed that Halleck was guilty of that too.)

  Soon after she was ousted, Halleck created a site she called Usedtobedoe. Halleck promised that Usedtobedoe would never prevent its members from getting directly in touch with law enforcement.

  The name infuriated the old guard, but the site attracted like-minded users. Ellen Leach in Mississippi recalled how hard it had been to get the Doe Network to present her proposed matches for Greg May to law enforcement. She was among the Doe members who followed Halleck to the new site, eventually renamed Porchlight International for the Missing and Unidentified.

  During all this, Halleck contended that her primary mission was the search for her foster sister, Jean Marie Stewart, who had disappeared in Miami Lakes in 1980. Those who use the sites to search for a missing relative have always had a certain cachet in the web sleuth world, and Halleck became known for posting on multiple sites, including Kristy Gault and Matt Wingo’s OCCI, about her angst over Jean Marie’s unknown fate. Halleck became an online ally of an OCCI member called Suzannec4444, who described herself as the half sister of child beauty queen, model, and actress Tammy Lynn Leppert, who, like Jean Marie Stewart, had vanished from Florida as a teenager. Leppert was last seen at age eighteen in Cocoa Beach in July 1983, three years after Jean Marie disappeared.

  Controversy over Suzannec4444 swirled from around 2005, when Leppert was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, through at least 2008. The boards exploded with questions and accusations from a dozen posters, including crystaldawn, NEWYORKEX, and unsolvedmysteriesfan. Was Suzanne, as she claimed, really Tammy’s biological half sister, adopted out of the family at birth? Was she an attention seeker who happened to see Tammy featured on Unsolved Mysteries and was now tying herself to Tammy’s celebrity persona? Was Tammy even dead? (Rumor had it that she dropped out of the limelight to pursue a nursing career or was in the witness protection program because she once witnessed a mob money-laundering scheme.) Creepiest of all, some wondered whether Suzannec4444 and Tammy Lynn Leppert were the same person.

  Lauran Halleck, using the screen name Porchlight, always defended Suzanne: a hero, Halleck insisted, for her selfless devotion. To Halleck, the fact that Suzanne had never actually met Tammy made her dedication to finding her all the more impressive.

  Gault, Wingo, and others on OCCI belonged to the Suzannec4444-is-a-fraud camp. Through OCCI, Wingo launched an “investigation” of Suzanne in which he and others posted doubts, accusations, and random nastiness, leading to a mini-firefight between him, Gault, Halleck, and Suzanne, who demanded OCCI remove Tammy’s entire thread from the site. Well, we ain’t gonna do that, Wingo wrote. You could almost hear his Texas drawl.

  That was when the hack occurred. Besides locking Gault and Wingo out of the site, their passwords were changed to “TAMI,” Leppert’s nickname, convincing Wingo that Halleck had spearheaded the attack in revenge for OCCI’s insinuations about Suzanne.

  Insults and recriminations flew through cyberspace. Wingo labeled Halleck a strange duck, a nasty old woman full of drama and harass
ment. Wingo was incensed when Halleck allegedly e-mailed Kristy Gault: “Tell abcman [Wingo’s screen name] he is history.”

  Ironically, Halleck and Wingo were both mavericks who supported web sleuths’ “right” to directly contact law enforcement. They both were deeply immersed in their separate quests to identify the nameless. Their mutual animosity stemmed more from a clash of cultures (Wingo once taunted, “Resurrect your 1960s civil rights heroes and go live in San Francisco, or Kenya. You are an absolute waste of time and bandwidth.” Halleck came from a family of liberals—her mother was a Democrat New Jersey councilwoman and self-described community activist) than any fundamental differences in their dedication to the cause.

  Buried within Porchlight, in a section labeled “off topic” accessible only to herself, Halleck maintained a selection of the vitriolic barbs Wingo and others had aimed at her between 2007 and 2009. The accusations range from the unfathomable—questioning whether Halleck was present at a murder—to the farcical—someone took her to task for pocketing money from the sale of her painted glass instead of donating it to a missing-person group.

  There was an element within the web sleuthing subculture that was all about power and control. Some individuals created mother lodes of information and then lorded it over anyone who came along to mine them. Others incited dissension, then peeked from behind a veil of anonymity at freak shows of their own creation. When emotional or physical limitations prevented some from navigating the real world, they seemed to delight in igniting online dramas and watching them blow up.

  After the “luvmycat” hack, Gault banned Halleck from Cold Case Investigations. If Halleck showed up on the site, Gault wrote, she would prosecute Halleck for trespassing. (Exactly how that charge would play out is hard to picture.) “I just try to keep a sense of humor,” Halleck told me, but it seemed that Halleck, eccentric and stubborn, had a bring-it-on attitude that didn’t square with her self-proclaimed innocence and grandmotherly appearance. She never admitted to me that she could give as good as she got, but her online exchanges proved her as feisty as the Jack Russell terrier and the Chihuahua in her kitchen.