by R. G. Belsky
Connie Wincott, Marty’s daughter, was not happy to see me when I knocked on the door of the townhouse. She told me her husband was angry because I had dragged his business into the investigation of her father’s death. She said he told her I was no longer welcome in their house. She told me a lot more things like that, but didn’t really do anything about them.
And she did let me in.
I think she knew how much her father cared about me and that I was only trying to do the right thing for him. I also think she wasn’t a strong-willed woman. She allowed herself to be bullied—mostly by her husband. But I eventually convinced her to let me look around Marty’s room again. I was afraid they might have already gotten rid of Marty’s stuff, but she said it was all still there.
On my way up the stairs to Marty’s old room, I passed by the bedroom that must have belonged to Michelle, the daughter. There were pictures on the walls of actors and pop stars; a banner from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; and a lot of other stuff that marked it as a young woman’s room. But the room also looked like it had been unused for a while, which made me more certain that Michelle didn’t spend much time in the house anymore.
Marty’s room looked pretty much the same as it had the last time I’d been here, except for the laptop computer I’d taken with me. I went through a big filing cabinet that held all sorts of papers and records—mostly notes and newspaper article clippings. Many of them were quite old. From stories Marty had covered over the years, mostly from the New Jersey paper.
Some of the newspaper clippings were yellow and tattered with age. I read through them anyway. All about people who had lived and died that Marty had covered as a journalist for so long. It all seemed important at the time, but not anymore. That’s the thing about news. It’s got a short life span before we move on to the next big story.
But none of this helped me find the answers I was looking for. Marty’s daughter had said he now used the computer to keep all his current journalistic notes. If there was anything connected to his death, that’s where I would have to look for it. But I’d already gone through those computer files, which was why I was here. At least, I’d gone through the ones I could read.
There was still that mysterious one with a subject line of “The Wanderer” that was password-protected. I had no idea what that meant, but maybe there was a clue there. Except, I’d tried a lot of passwords to get onto the site. Hoping I’d get lucky with one of them. Marty’s name. His dead wife’s name. His daughter. His granddaughter. His son-in-law. But all of them gave me a message back that said: “Incorrect Password—Access Denied.”
If Marty had gone to all those lengths to hide this information, it stood to reason that this mysterious file called The Wanderer might be relevant. Only that didn’t help me if I couldn’t figure out what it was. Where did that leave me?
I’d have to try the computer again later when I got back to the office. See if there was any way I could break in and read it. Maybe some of the tech people at the station could help me figure out how to do that. Or I could go back to Todd Schacter, I realized. I figured Schacter would be able to break into the secret file. Except I was reluctant to use someone like Schacter again unless it was absolutely necessary.
Meanwhile, I kept going through the rest of the stuff here in Marty’s room until I found something interesting. Didn’t seem like much to me at first. Just a collection of bills and receipts Marty had paid in the preceding weeks and months.
I paged through them casually, not sure what I was looking for. Most of it was ordinary payments and financial stuff. Bank statements. Medicare and other health bills. Credit card receipts. I found out that Marty had a substantial amount of IRA money put away for his retirement. That he took a series of medicines for high blood pressure, gout, and a few other ailments. And that he still maintained subscriptions to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other major publications. None of it seemed important to me.
Until I got to the travel stuff.
Marty had taken a trip recently—several of them over the past few months—to Fort Wayne, Indiana. There were receipts from plane tickets there and back—plus records of hotels and restaurants in Indiana. What in the hell was Marty doing going back and forth to Fort Wayne, Indiana?
I went back downstairs and asked his daughter if she knew anything about trips he’d taken.
“Oh, yes. He was traveling a lot at the end. That was unusual for my father. He always hated traveling when I was growing up. We hardly ever went away on a vacation. Which is why I was so surprised when he started going away so much now.”
“Do you know why he was traveling?”
She shrugged. “No, Dad never told us. To be honest, we didn’t communicate a lot at the end. He and my husband … well, they didn’t get along. That affected my relationship with my father, too. My husband, he didn’t want me encouraging my father in what he called his crazy foolishness. I tried to stay quiet and out of everyone’s way. The times my father was traveling were peaceful for me here because I didn’t have to deal with the battles between him and my husband.”
“Any idea where he went on these trips?”
Another shrug.
“Was one of the places Fort Wayne, Indiana?”
“I suppose it could be.”
“Why would Marty go to Indiana?”
“Well, you know … because of his background there.”
“What background?”
“That’s where he came from. Indiana. He was born and raised there. And his first job in journalism was as a reporter for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. He later became city editor there. That’s where we lived when I was growing up. In Indiana.”
Damn. I never even considered anything like that. I assumed Marty had started life as a fifty-year-old crusty editor at a newspaper in New Jersey. But he had a past. He’d come from somewhere. That somewhere was Indiana.
He’d had a newspaper article from Indiana, too. The one I’d found the first time I looked through his computer files. About the murder of a teenaged girl named Becky Bluso in Eckersville, Indiana, back in 1990. That newspaper article—and long-ago murder—didn’t mean anything to me at the time. But now I wondered if there was a connection between it and Marty’s recent trips back to Indiana.
But why?
Why would Marty still care about a thirty-year-old murder case in Indiana?
CHAPTER 16
WHEN I GOT back to the office, I googled Becky Bluso. Even though the Bluso murder had happened thirty years ago, there were still a number of stories about it on the web. It had been one of the most sensational murder cases ever in Indiana and that area of the country.
Becky Bluso was a high school student in Eckersville, Indiana, a small city located between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis. Eckersville was—by all accounts—an All-American town and the Blusos were an All-American family. Becky’s father, Robert, sold insurance, her mother, Elizabeth, was a nurse, and Becky was a cheerleader and an honor student at the local high school. She had two sisters, one named Betty who’d gone away to school in Maine, and another named Bonnie a year behind Becky in high school.
They lived in a quiet, bucolic neighborhood where crime was a rarity, not a part of everyday life as it was in New York. There had only been a handful of murders in Eckersville over the years, and none of them even remotely as horrific or unexplained as the death of Becky Bluso.
She was killed in her home in broad daylight on a hot summer day in August of 1990. School was about to resume in the fall, and Becky and her younger sister, Bonnie, had gone out that morning to shop for clothes. Her sister then headed to a swimming class at the local YWCA, while Becky said she was going home to try on some of her new clothes. Their parents were at work and her older sister was already away at college, so Becky was there alone in the middle of the day. But she had told her sister she expected to meet a friend at the house later.
It was the friend—a neighborhood girl named Teresa Lofton who lived o
n the same street—that found her when she arrived later that afternoon. The front door was open, the Lofton girl went in and discovered Becky Bluso’s bloodied body lying on the bed. She ran screaming from the house and police soon arrived onto a horrifying scene. Becky had been stabbed a dozen times. She’d been tied to the bed by rope and her clothes were mostly off, but there was no evidence of sexual assault. The ME’s office later placed the time of death at around 1:30 p.m., an hour after she’d gotten back from shopping with her sister.
The investigation was exhaustive. Hundreds of people were interviewed—friends at school, neighbors, local store owners of places Becky visited—looking for a suspect or reason for the shocking murder.
At first, police thought she might have surprised a burglar who panicked and killed her. But it was later determined that nothing had been taken from the house. Also, the brutality of the murder—the fact that Becky was stabbed a dozen times—indicated it was a crime of passion, not someone out for monetary gain.
All of her boyfriends and potential boyfriends and pretty much any other man in her life was questioned extensively. As a cute cheerleader, Becky was popular with the boys. She’d been dating one boy, recently broken off a relationship with another, and had a lot of potential suitors, too.
A few of them emerged as potential suspects for the police at first. One of them, a seventeen-year-old at her high school, had become so obsessed with her that he besieged her with phone calls and notes professing his love. A female student who was secretly a lesbian—this was long before people felt comfortable coming out publicly as gay—had come on to Becky in a school shower after gym class, but was rebuffed.
But no hard evidence was ever found to link either of these two—or anyone else—to the murder. The operative police theory though was still a stalker of some sort had gotten into the house, she’d confronted him, and the encounter turned violent. Except the police never could say who that person might be. And now, thirty years later, they still had no idea.
They also re-traced Becky’s steps in the hours and days leading up to the murder. The shopping trip with her sister. What she’d talked about with her mother and father that morning before they left for work. All the other recent things she’d done.
On the night before her murder, there had been a barbecue in the Bluso family’s backyard with several neighborhood families attending. One of the neighbors who was there—a man named Ed Weiland, who lived next door to the Bluso family—said Becky seemed distracted and quiet during the barbecue. “Like she had something on her mind” was the way he put it. But whatever that was, she never said anything about it before she was killed.
I found out all this by reading through articles at the time of the crime. It had been a big story, especially in the Indianapolis/Ft. Wayne area. There had probably been a lot of local TV news coverage, too, but back then most of that would be on videotapes stored away in a library at the station—not available on YouTube like now.
I did manage to find one video from a local station at the time online, though. In it, Becky’s mother and father are interviewed on camera talking about the death of their daughter. It was difficult to watch and brought back memories of many times I’d interviewed the family members of a murder victim or tragedy. They were crying on camera as they tried to deal with the enormity of their loss—the shocking murder of their beautiful and smart and popular seventeen-year-old daughter. My God, I thought to myself as I watched it now, Becky Bluso would be older than I was today if she’d lived.
“I know we can’t bring Becky back,” the mother sobbed on the screen. “All we can hope for at this point are some answers. Answers to how something like this could have happened. And in our own home. We want the answers to those questions so that we can allow Becky to rest in peace.”
Except the answers never came.
There was a picture of Becky Bluso on the video. She was dressed in her cheerleader outfit. A pretty, smiling teenage girl, with her whole life seemingly ahead of her and no hint of the horrible end she would soon meet at the hands of a brutal killer.
My assumption was that Marty had covered the Becky Bluso murder story while he was at the Fort Wayne paper—and had gone back after all this time looking for answers to the unsolved murder.
I was able to confirm the first part of this quickly with a phone call to the Fort Wayne paper. Marty had been the city editor at the time of the Bluso girl’s murder, and he led the coverage of the story so well that the paper won numerous awards for it. All this acclaim led to a bigger job offer from a paper on the East Coast. He moved there several months after the Bluso murder, eventually winding up as editor of the paper where I met him years later.
The Becky Bluso story had catapulted Marty’s career. I thought of how similar that was to me and the Lucy Devlin story, which won me a Pulitzer as a young reporter and made me a media star. I had never been able to rest until I got all the answers about Lucy Devlin a long time later.
I wondered if that was what Marty had been doing with Becky Bluso—going back to get answers to questions he still had about what was probably the biggest unsolved crime story he’d ever covered.
In fact, the more I thought about it, I was pretty sure that must have been what Marty was doing.
Except one thing didn’t make sense.
Marty had been obsessed with a story about New York City building corruption and about Terri Hartwell and presumably about his son-in-law’s business/political campaign dealings with her.
Was there some connection that I was missing?
No, Marty probably just got curious about what happened with the old murder, that long-ago big story he covered back in Indiana. He started looking at it again at the same time he was investigating the corruption stuff here. One thing obviously had nothing to do with the other.
But I was curious, too.
That’s the thing about being a journalist—you get curious.
Sometimes that curiosity takes you places you wouldn’t normally go.
CHAPTER 17
I TOOK OUT Marty’s computer again and began going through his files one more time, looking for some kind of lead. In the end, I kept coming back to the file I couldn’t open. I looked at the file name again—“The Wanderer.” What the hell did “The Wanderer” mean? There must be answers in there. All I had to do was figure out how to read it.
I tried new passwords. The name of Marty’s dog that he loved so much for years when I used to work with him. The name of the paper where he was an editor for his whole career. Humphrey Bogart who was his favorite actor. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who were always his journalistic heroes. Hell, I even tried my own name. Clare first. Then Carlson. Finally, both of them together.
Nothing worked until I thought of another thing.
Marty didn’t call me Clare.
He called me Clarissa.
I punched in the name “Clarissa” as my password, and suddenly I was on the site. The entire website—Marty’s secret, password-protected website—opened up in front of me.
At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
There was a big picture of Ted Bundy at the top of the page. Yes, that Ted Bundy. America’s most prolific serial killer who had murdered at least thirty women—maybe even as many as fifty—back in the seventies and eighties before eventually being executed in Florida. Handsome, suave, charming—he lured his female victims to their deaths by convincing them that he was a nice guy. Until it was too late for them.
There were also pictures and drawings of David Berkowitz aka Son of Sam; The Zodiac Killer; Richard Ramirez, known as The Night Stalker; The Hillside Stranger; and many more. America’s most famous—or infamous, I guess—serial killers.
But why had Marty been so interested in all these serial killers from the past, many of them dead now?
The answer—at least as much as an answer as I could figure out—came in the next section.
There was an article there that Marty had posted to
the site. Presumably meant for publication by him at some point. But, for now, it was only on this personal and password-protected website of his.
The headline was:
THE SECRET SERIAL KILLER
Scarier Than Ted Bundy or Any of the Others
By Marty Barlow
There is a misconception by the public about the serial killer phenomenon—a mistaken belief that a serial killer always seeks media attention. This is fueled by all the movies, all the TV shows, and all the thriller novels about serial killers.
This is true for many serial killers. Like Son of Sam or the Zodiac Killer and others who taunted the police and public with messages boasting about their rising body count and threats of future victims. Yes, they did crave the public spotlight.
But there is an even more dangerous kind of serial killer. The serial killer we don’t know about until it is too late.
I believe there is someone out there like that now.
Carrying out murder after murder quietly—over a period of years and in many states and cities and locations around the country—without anyone noticing the connections between all these killings.
I’m calling him “The Wanderer” …
I read through the entire article. There was a series of pictures with it. All of these were head shots of young women. I counted twenty. They were all attractive women. I presumed that all of them were dead. I was right.
But it was the first picture on this list that interested me the most.
A picture of Becky Bluso.
I sat there in stunned silence in the newsroom. A TV played in the background, but I’d turned the sound down to concentrate on Marty’s notes. The only sound I could hear now was my own rapid breathing as I tried to grasp the enormity of all this.
Damn, Marty wasn’t just investigating a buildings corruption scandal when he died.
