Diary of a Serial Killer

by Ed Gaffney

  It was strange how it was all playing out. Neil Heinrich hadn’t always had his act together. He was plenty smart—he’d even gone to college—but when he was growing up, he was kind of a loose cannon emotionally.

  But ever since Neil started with the company, ten, maybe twelve years ago, he had been Mr. Responsibility, showing up every day, working hard with his father, learning how to manage every part of the business.

  When his dad had gotten sick, Neil pitched right in to help run things. And when his dad had gotten so ill that he couldn’t even come to work anymore, Neil fully took over. Even if he wouldn’t admit it to anyone else.

  When the coughing stopped, Paul asked, “Do you need your medicine?”

  The old man shook his head and made a face. “I hate that stuff. Screw it. I’d rather just cough.” He popped a breath mint into his mouth, then said, “Listen, Paulie. I gotta ask you something.”

  The car turned down First Street toward where most of the downtown restaurants were. “Sure, Mr. Heinrich.”

  “Neil’s gonna need a lot of help with collection, at least at the beginning—you know, after I’m gone. People are gonna see what they can get away with, see how far they can push, you know what I mean?”

  They pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Paul turned off the engine and nodded. “I do.”

  Mr. Heinrich cleared his throat. “I talked about a lot of things with Neil, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be fine, but I told him that if he runs into trouble, he’s gotta use you, especially down near the river. You know. O’Malley & Sons, Stein’s, Best Air, all of those accounts. They know you. They know what you can do. It’ll help Neil if they understand that even though I’m not around anymore, nothing’s really changed.”

  Just then, Paul’s phone rang. He answered it, and then handed the phone to Mr. Heinrich, saying, “It’s Alan Lombardo.”

  Iris A. Dubinski

  IT WAS 8:23 P.M. ON AUGUST 23 WHEN IRIS Dubinski answered the door for the last time in her life.

  She was feeling a little stressed, because she’d needed to stay late at the office to rewrite a memo explaining the new overtime policy, and so she was running behind. She had a very early flight the following morning—she was taking a week off at a spa in San Diego, and then going to an important meeting in Los Angeles. She had to pack, close up the house, make sure the cat was taken care of, and do the dozens of other things that she needed to do before she could leave.

  When the doorbell rang it didn’t really surprise her, because it wasn’t unusual for her boss to send her last-minute materials by messenger before a trip. So she didn’t hesitate to open the door.

  Minutes later, she was lying on her back in the middle of her living room, bound and gagged with duct tape, staring at the terrifying man with the gun, who had entered her house saying only, “Welcome to my world, Iris Dubinski. Two down, four to go.”

  SIX

  August 26

  DETECTIVE VERA DEMOPOLOUS GOT A COLD bottle of water out of the refrigerator, sat down at her kitchen table, and for what must have been the fifteenth time since the letter had arrived at the station two days ago, began again to read.

  My Dear Vera,

  I know that we haven’t known each other that long, but I feel compelled to tell you immediately how impressed I was with your decision to keep our little communications off the front pages. I expected a very unpleasant public debate about the contents of my letter, speculation about my next victim, and who knows what else?

  I so much prefer that our dialogue is private.

  And I’m happy to report that this letter is being written after my latest work, so I will be able to share my diary entry for that exciting day:

  August 23. Practice has truly made perfect. I don’t like to plan too much before I go into the house. Sometimes I have a general idea of what I’m going to do after we’ve gotten started, but most of the time, I just improvise.

  Today, I must admit that I was inspired.

  Seconds after I knocked on the door, she opened it, I used my friend the Taser, and voilà! I was in the house, and she was wrapped up quite nicely.

  You know my preferences—taping my quarry to a chair, or the floor, or whatever is handy, and then shooting for a while to see what happens. But this time, I thought I’d just bind up her hands and feet, but leave her free to wiggle around. And then see what happens.

  Vera took another sip of water and skipped ahead to the end of the letter. She didn’t need to wallow in this maniac’s account of the bloody details of a crime she didn’t even know had occurred. If he really did all the things he described in the diary entry, she’d find out soon enough when they discovered the body.

  Even though I didn’t mean for it to end like that, it was probably for the best, because I had been there for several minutes, and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

  I got the pictures I needed, and then I flipped her back over. I’m happy to report that despite the mess we had made, her right index finger was still in very good shape.

  I cut it off, washed up a little, and returned home.

  Hello Vera. I am back.

  I have to admit, I’m somewhat proud of this one. It was the perfect combination of planning and spontaneity. I knew I was going to do her, and when, and how, but not at the detail level. I waited for the moment to decide about that, and it turned into something of a masterpiece.

  I don’t really know you that well yet, but I hope when you find the body, and verify that everything you’ve read is accurate, you’re the kind of person who can appreciate the type of effort that went into that slaying. It was a work of art.

  I’m going to leave you now. But don’t worry. I will be in touch soon.

  Vera put the copy of the letter back into the file that she had brought home with her. No matter how many times she read it, she didn’t feel any closer to finding who sent it.

  The original of the note was still being worked on by the lab, but Vera didn’t expect them to find much more than they already had. The envelope and paper were ordinary. The labels on the envelope were ordinary. The return address was a fake Springfield post office box. Anyone who went to the amount of trouble this crackpot did to write and mail this kind of a letter to the police about his crime had to be intelligent enough to keep fingerprints and any identifying evidence out of their hands.

  The only thing they were relatively sure of was that the printer was one of the least expensive and most popular out there—a Printex 343.

  Vera had also checked into missing persons reports for an adult female living in the Springfield area, but so far, no luck.

  Normally, Vera was an optimistic person, but even though she hoped that the description of the murder contained in the letter was a bluff, it sure didn’t sound like one.

  Thank goodness her new partner would be joining her any day now. Technically, he wasn’t actually a partner—he was a state police detective assigned to assist her in the investigation. But Vera couldn’t have cared less. She was going to need all the help she could get, especially if this second murder turned out to be real.

  And it was also a good thing that she didn’t wear much makeup, because lately she’d been spending so much time in front of those insanely hot television camera lights that if she had, her face would probably have melted off by now. Vera finished her water, got up, and went into her bedroom.

  As she changed from her sweaty work clothes into a T-shirt and shorts, Vera said a silent prayer of thanks that her air conditioner worked so quickly.

  Not that Vera was complaining about the attention the Chatham murder investigation was getting. Having the lieutenant assign such an important case to her obviously meant that he had a lot of faith in her. Although it was pretty clear that neither of them knew just how important the case really was until they saw the press go crazy about the similarity of the Chatham murder to those of the Springfield Shooter two decades earlier.

  Once that story got started,
Vera had been spending about as much time dealing with reporters as she had running down leads.

  When you’ve got more than four dogs, put them in the same room at dinnertime and feed them all together. Otherwise you’ll spend your whole day opening cans of Alpo.

  It was a safe bet that Grandma Burke hadn’t thought that her experience raising dog-sled teams in Alaska would help organize daily press conferences in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  Funny how Grandma’s advice about animals came in so handy when dealing with reporters.

  Okay, that was a little mean. Some of these people really weren’t bad. A few of them just wanted to learn the truth and present it to the public.

  But most of them seemed interested only in having Vera say something that they could use to generate an inflammatory headline. Those reporters were definitely dogs.

  Now Vera took a container of chef’s salad out of the refrigerator, and brought it over to the little table she had set up in her half living room, half dining room. As she began to eat the leftovers from yesterday’s dinner, she opened up the Chatham file and, for the hundredth time in the past ten days, went through the names she had been generating as possible suspects since she first spoke to Willy Grasso.

  She started with the police who were involved in the Springfield Shooter investigation twenty years ago. The two lead detectives were Willy and his then-partner, Ole Pedersen. And although Vera personally knew beyond any doubt that neither man was capable of committing murder, she had treated each of them like everyone else on the list. Just another person to clear, or to investigate further.

  But eliminating Willy and Ole as suspects took about fifteen seconds. On the night of Cory Chatham’s murder, Willy Grasso was in Sarasota, Florida, attending a dinner theatre performance of Mame with his wife and a dozen of their friends from their retirement community. And Ole Pedersen had been in the Springfield Memorial Hospital, recuperating from prostate surgery.

  So that left her with only about three and a half pages of other names to go through.

  Next were the uniformed officers who had discovered the victims. The only one who might have seen the message “Welcome to my world” at more than one Springfield Shooter crime scene was Officer Earl Quincy, who had been the only cop involved in finding more than one victim. He had been the responding officer for victims four and nine, and so he could have seen two of the six notes that the Springfield Shooter had left behind.

  As unlikely a candidate as Quincy seemed, Vera checked into his whereabouts on the night of Chatham’s murder, and learned that he had left the Springfield force eight years ago, and had then moved to South Carolina. She hadn’t yet reached him, so Quincy was still on the list. But not exactly a prime suspect.

  And there were dozens of officers, crime-scene specialists, lab techs, and others who had seen the telltale greeting. Running them down was going to take a lot of time.

  And there were the assistant district attorneys who had worked on the case, who turned out to be a pretty impressive cast of characters. The lead A.D.A., who later went on to serve as the district attorney for another county, was named Robert MacManus. It was a safe bet that MacManus wasn’t involved, though, since he died of a stroke nine years ago. Of the four prosecutors working with him on the case, two had gone on to become judges: Mary Feldman and Charles Gutman. Although she felt a little silly doing it, Vera established alibis for both. Feldman and her husband had been attending a birthday dinner for one of their grandchildren, and Gutman had been vacationing in Denver.

  The remaining two prosecutors were Sarah D’Abruzzo, who was now married and had changed her name to Sarah Sandstrom, and Dan Dorrenbock. Both had left the D.A.’s office, and were in private practice. Vera had verified Sandstrom’s alibi—she had been working late on the night in question, with four associates, on a brief they were preparing. Dorrenbock and Vera had been playing phone tag for the past three days. So his name was still on her list.

  And on and on it went. There were support personnel in the prosecutor’s office to check, and the members of the state police who helped Willy Grasso with his investigation, and the support personnel in that office. All in all, there were probably between one and two hundred names on the list, which itself had taken Vera almost a week just to compile.

  But that’s what police work was about. Details. Not taking anything for granted.

  And staying focused.

  Which was why it was time to take a break from the list, and replay that videotape of the crime-scene footage.

  If there was one thing that Vera really relied on in her work, it was repetition. She didn’t look at the tape of a crime scene once or twice. She looked at it once or twice a day. Until she solved the case.

  It was just her way of making sure that her memory of the scene was true. It also helped her ask questions. She loved asking questions. It used to drive her older brothers nuts. “Why did you get home from school ten minutes later than usual today?” “Who would you rather have on your baseball team—Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger?” “If you were walking down the street, and suddenly a gigantic bear started running after you, what would you do?”

  Now Vera pressed the play button on the remote, and a picture of the home of Corey Chatham flashed onto the television screen. The officer taking the video had been standing on the street, and started with a wide shot, which included the one-car garage, the short driveway leading to it from the street, with Chatham’s sleek sports car parked in it.

  Then she zoomed in on the front door.

  At least this latest letter had solved one of the puzzles of the Chatham case. If the victim had let the murderer into the house through the front door, he would have seen who he was through its decorative window. And that’s probably what had happened. There was no sign of a break-in. No windows were broken, no locks were forced.

  So either the killer had a key to Chatham’s place, or Chatham had opened the door to someone he didn’t believe to be a threat. And then the killer blasted him with a Taser—leaving the burn marks they found on Chatham’s neck and chest.

  On the one hand, it would make sense for the killer and Chatham to be acquainted. Most murder victims knew their killers. In fact, by far, most murders were crimes of passion. The usual killers were angry husbands and boyfriends. Something went sour in the relationship, they freaked out, and attacked their wife or girlfriend.

  By now, the image on Vera’s television had changed to the living room, where Corey Chatham’s dead body sat taped to the recliner.

  Which was one of the many problems with the crime of passion theory. Why duct tape? That didn’t make any sense. If you were an enraged lover, you just lashed out and shot. You didn’t take the time to tape someone to a chair.

  They were still making inquiries into Chatham’s life—friends, family, girlfriend, ex-wife, whatever. Maybe they’d find something there, but Vera wasn’t counting on it. Sure, the shot to the groin—gross—might have been some kind of sexual payback. But that, combined with the point-blank shot to the eye, the removed finger and the duct tape, just didn’t add up to passion. At least not the kind of passion behind most murders.

  And how about that note? The lab had confirmed that it had been generated by a computer printer, and not by any printer in Chatham’s house. It had to have been written before the killing, and was intended to convince the police that the Springfield Shooter was responsible. The murderer had obviously done a considerable amount of research and planning before killing Corey Chatham.

  Vera had asked for the files of the Springfield Shooter investigation to be called up from archives. It would be interesting to compare the weird combination of facts in this case with the facts of those earlier crimes. But that would be tomorrow’s work. It was time to take a break.

  She stretched, turned off the television, and reached over to sort through the pile of mail she had scooped out of the box on her way in.

  It was all junk, bills and catalogs, except for a si
ngle, ordinary, white envelope.

  Which bore ordinary address labels, and a Springfield post office box for a return address.

  But when Vera turned it over to pull open the flap, she saw the sticker on that side of the envelope, which was not ordinary at all. Because it read: Welcome to my world.

  SEVEN

  ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY CARTIER: Detective, what was the first contact you had with the defendant in the context of this case?

  DETECTIVE WILLIAM GRASSO: On March 13, 1984, we received an anonymous tip that a white car with license plate number XR4 54P was seen driving on Yale Street at about ten P.M. on the night of March 11. The killer’s ninth victim had been murdered in her house on Yale Street on that night, at about that time. So we ran the plate.

  Q I’m sorry. You what?

  A Sorry. We checked the records of the registry. We learned the license plate was registered to an Alan Lombardo, for a white Ford LTD. His address in the records was listed as 12 Foster Lane.

  Q At this point, did you consider Mr. Lombardo a suspect?

  ATTORNEY NEHEMIAH WILSON: Objection.

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  DETECTIVE GRASSO: No, he wasn’t a suspect. But we sure wanted to talk to him.

  Q And did you talk to him?

  A Yes. After we got the tip, my partner and I visited Mr. Lombardo at his home in Indian Oaks.

  Q Did you call Mr. Lombardo to let him know you were coming?

  A No. We wanted to see how he reacted when he was approached by police.

  Q And how did he react?

  A Well, he was surprised to see us, I think. But he was basically fine. You know. Polite. Although he seemed awfully, well, normally I’d say nervous, but I’m not sure that really covers it.

  ATTORNEY NEHEMIAH WILSON: Objection.

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY CARTIER: How do you mean?

  A Well, he had this, I guess you’d call it a twitch, or something. Like he was always blinking his eyes. And he had, you know those disposable wet napkins they have now for cleaning babies?