by R. G. Belsky
He wasn’t only trying to dig up political dirt on his son-in-law.
Marty Barlow believed he was on the trail of a serial killer.
CHAPTER 18
MARTY HAD BEEN working on two different stories at the same time.
He’d started out investigating the building corruption story in New York. But then, for some reason, he’d become interested in the old Becky Bluso murder case from when he was a young journalist in Indiana. Whatever he uncovered led him to the serial killer idea. This was the only scenario that made sense.
Except it didn’t really make sense.
First off, Marty had violated a basic rule of journalism, one he taught me and other young reporters. That rule was: “Work on one story at a time. Finish that story before you start another one. Otherwise, you’ll do a half-ass job on each one and wind up with no story at all.” I can’t count how many times Marty lectured me about that, both while I was working for him and even afterward. And yet, in the middle of working the New York City corruption scandal story, Marty switched gears and began chasing a serial killer story.
Also, how had Marty found out about all these murders? He was an old retired—or almost retired—newspaperman living in New York City. Okay, he probably stumbled onto the corruption scandal because of his son-in-law’s presumed involvement in whatever was going on with Terri Hartwell’s office and all the rest. And then began looking into the long-ago Becky Bluso murder because of his past newspaper connection covering it. But the rest of the murders were in totally different locations and no one had ever put the pieces together the way he was doing over a thirty-year-period. Why Marty? And why now?
Were these two stories—the city building corruption and the murder victims—somehow connected in a way I couldn’t see? Was it possible Marty thought his son-in-law, Thomas Wincott, was the serial killer he called The Wanderer? That seemed unlikely to me. What about someone else in the corruption story? Chad Enright? No, Enright was only in his thirties. He’d have been like five years old when the killings on that list started. Was there something—or someone—else in the picture that I was missing?
Then there was the biggest question of all.
Was any of this serial killer stuff even true?
Or was Marty just a crazy old man at the end?
So desperate to prove he still mattered in today’s fast-changing world of journalism that he created an imaginary serial killer?
I returned to the pictures of the twenty women murder victims on the computer screen in front of me.
The picture of Becky Bluso was at the top. It was larger than the pictures of the other women. Maybe that’s because Bluso meant more to Marty because she had been his first big crime story. Or maybe because he believed she was the first victim. Or maybe some combination of the two.
Underneath the pictures of each victim were their name, the date and place they were killed, and some details about the murder.
I read through the information about all of the murders, looking for an obvious pattern. I found none. The murder sites jumped back and forth all over the country. The method of murder was not consistent. Many victims had been stabbed. But a few had died after being been strangled or from a blow to the head. The killer never used a gun, but that was the only thing exactly the same in all of the murders.
Even the physical characteristics of the victims varied. Some were brunette, some blond, one was a redhead—and their ages varied from seventeen—Becky Bluso—to the twenties and late thirties. Most serial killers have a “type” of woman they target. But apparently not this one.
There was another problem, too.
I picked up the phone and made a few calls to local media and law enforcement agencies and discovered that several of the murders on the list had already been solved or were close to being solved. Which meant they weren’t the work of a serial killer, just individual murders committed randomly by different suspects in various locations over the years.
If they didn’t fit the pattern, why had Marty put them on his list?
I went back to Marty’s files again. In them, he had included a lot of other material about serial killers.
There was a series of quotes from Ted Bundy, collected over the years. I read some of them now: “I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet”; “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere”; “What’s one less person on the face of the earth anyway?” and—perhaps his most chilling quote of all—“Murder is not about lust and it’s not about violence. It’s about possession. When you feel the last breath of life coming out of the woman, you look into her eyes. At that point, it’s being God.”
There were more quotes collected from other infamous serial killers over the years. From Son of Sam: “I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I didn’t want to hurt them, I just wanted to kill them.” From Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker: “I love to kill people … love all that blood.” From the Zodiac Killer: “I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is much more fun than hunting wild game in the forest.”
Scary stuff all right.
Marty also explained a bit more about why he had come up with the name “The Wanderer” for the serial killer he believed was out there. He wrote:
“This man has been 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 don’t know this person’s identity yet. But, when I was a young man, I always remember that song from Dion called ‘The Wanderer.’ All about someone chasing pretty girls all over the country, never staying long in one place—but moving on after each girl. ‘I roam around, around, around …’ the refrain goes. It seems particularly appropriate now.”
I looked back at the pictures of the twenty young women again. Victims—or possible victims—of “The Wanderer.”
Was a single person responsible for all these deaths?
Or even some of them?
And was The Wanderer—if he even existed—still out there targeting more women for death?
I didn’t have the answers to these questions.
But I knew what I had to do to go looking for them.
Follow another important rule Marty taught me a long time ago about how to cover a complex or confusing story.
Start at the beginning.
The beginning of this story was Becky Bluso.
CHAPTER 19
I’D NEVER BEEN to Indiana. But I found out I could get there in under two hours by flying directly to Indianapolis, then renting a car for the forty-five-minute drive to Eckersville, the town where Becky Bluso had been murdered. I figured I could do it all in a day, in and out without staying the night.
I wasn’t exactly sure why I was going—or what I was looking for. I’d already googled a lot of material about the Becky Bluso murder and read the recent article in the Fort Wayne paper. But I’ve always found as a journalist that it’s better to see things firsthand on a story you’re covering. I wanted to do that now with Becky Bluso. Maybe it would help me get some answers.
Between this and my trips to Virginia to see Lucy, I was piling up the days out of the office. Sooner or later, Faron was going to call me on that. But I’d worry about that when it happened. Because that’s the way I’ve always operated. Did everything I had to do to get the story, then worried about the other stuff afterward.
The first place I went when I got to Eckersville was the house where Becky Bluso had lived—and was killed. A simple white house with blue shutters and trim about halfway down the block on a street called Oak Park Drive. Surrounded by other houses that looked almost identical, right down to the blue shutters and trim on many of them. It all seemed so ordinary and so peaceful and so safe as I stood there on the street and tried to envision the terror that had taken place there on that long-ago day.
There was no one on the street at this time of morning, and no sign of anyone inside the house where
Becky Bluso once lived. Whoever lived there now was probably at work or at school or whatever they did. No one was thinking about the brutal murder that took place here a long time ago except me.
I thought about walking up to the house and peering in one of the windows, but decided that might draw unwanted attention from the neighbors. I might have done that in New York City, where no one paid any notice to anyone else. But not in Eckersville, Indiana. I just sat in my car and stared at the house.
I tried to envision what it must have been like here back on that August afternoon in 1990. The girlfriend from down the street coming over to meet Becky. Finding her bloody body dead inside the house. Police cars and ambulances converging on Oak Park Drive for the biggest crime Eckersville ever experienced. But now Oak Park Drive was a quiet small-town street again.
I got back in my rental car and drove next to the high school Becky Bluso had attended. This time I did get out and walk around the school area a bit. In the back was a football field and a grandstand and a scoreboard that said “Go Bulldogs!” I thought about how Becky Bluso must have stood on this spot and led “Go Bulldogs” cheers as a teenaged cheerleader for Eckersville High.
On the other hand, the school behind me looked new. Maybe the high school had been somewhere else when Becky Bluso went there. It was all a moot point anyway. I didn’t expect to find the killer still lurking under the grandstand. I just wanted to get a feel of the life Becky Bluso would have led before someone took it all away from her so violently and senselessly at the age of seventeen.
The police department in Eckersville was housed in a modern brick building in the center of town, next to the city hall and a library and a recreation center. I introduced myself to the police chief, a man named Jeff Parkman, and told him what I was there for. Parkman didn’t seem surprised.
“You’re the third reporter to come here asking questions about the Bluso murder,” he said when I asked him about it.
“Who were the other two?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“Eileen Nagle, works for the Fort Wayne paper. And some old guy who said he came here from New York City to find out more about the case. Just like you.”
“Marty Barlow?”
“Yeah, that was him. Weird old guy. I mean I liked him, but he seemed seriously intense about Bluso’s death. What’s all the interest in it now with you people after all this time anyway?”
Parkman looked to be in his forties, a decent-looking guy in a crisp blue uniform who seemed affable enough and willing to talk to another reporter. I saw only one other police officer in the station. Of course, the rest of them could be out chasing ax murderers, but I got the feeling crime was not an overwhelming problem in Eckersville.
I told him my station was doing a roundup of some of the most violent unsolved murder cases around the country. It seemed like the best way to go. Another lie. But just a little one this time. I was lying to everyone these days. My boss, my daughter—and now this guy. The lying got easier the more I did it.
“It’s the biggest crime case we ever had around here,” Parkman said, pretty much stating the obvious. “I was around back then, so I remember it well. It changed this town. It changed me, too. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
“Were you on the force when she was murdered?”
“No, I was too young. But I knew her. Becky, that is. I mean, I knew who she was. I went to high school with her. I was a freshman at Eckersville High that year. I still remember the memorial service they held in the school auditorium here. People crying and praying … it was awful. Tough to relate to something like that when you’re a kid. Hell, it still is.”
He took me through the facts of the case. A lot of them I already knew, but there were new details. Including what happened to the family afterward. The younger sister, Bonnie—the one who had gone shopping with Becky that day—died of leukemia six years later. She was only twenty-two. The father later died of a heart attack, and the older sister, Betty, never came back to Eckersville after college, apparently because of all the tragedy. That left the mother all alone, so it was no surprise when she died, too, a few years later. “They said it was cancer,” Parkman told me, “but everyone has always believed she died of a broken heart. She never got over losing Becky like that, followed by all the rest.”
I asked him if there were ever any real suspects in the Bluso murder.
“If we’re talking on the record here, the answer is no.”
“How about off the record?”
“You promise you won’t put any of this on the air or report on it in any way?”
“I’m just looking into the Becky Bluso story at this point to see if it’s even worth covering for us. I don’t even have a video crew here with me. Anything you say to me is between us. I wouldn’t go public with it before checking with you first. You have my word as a journalist on that, Chief Parkman. And I take my word as a journalist seriously.”
He nodded.
“After I became chief here, I started looking into the case whenever I could. Like I said, I had a personal interest because I knew Becky. At first, I’d suspected the neighbor. Ed Weiland, the one who was at a barbecue with the family the night before the murder happened. He had a lot of guns and knives in his house. No one ever directly linked him to the murder, but I always wondered about Weiland.
“Then there was his son. Seth. He went to school with Becky and supposedly had a big crush on her. People said he was always hanging around the Bluso house, and someone once caught him trying to peep into the window there. He was a strange kid. I liked him even better for it than the father. But it was too late to question him by then. Seth Weiland was killed in a car crash about fifteen years ago. The father is gone, too, now.”
I asked if there had been any other suspects.
“Oh, lots of suspects. Hell, Becky had a lot of admirers—and a few that even seemed obsessed with her. And why not? I mean, she was this pretty, popular cheerleader who seemed almost perfect. Pretty much everyone at Eckersville High back then had a thing for Becky Bluso.”
“How about you?” I asked.
“How about me what?”
“You said you went to high school with her. Did you ever go out with her?”
Parkman laughed. “Jeez, I was a freshman, and she was the star cheerleader. She barely knew I existed. I used to see her in the halls and cheering at the games, but I never got a chance to know her. I was too young. And then she was gone.”
Parkman had several pictures displayed prominently on his desk. Pictures of himself with his family. A pretty wife and three kids, two girls and a boy. The pictures had been taken over a period of years, showing the children at different ages as they grew up. Parkman looked over at the pictures now.
“I’ve had a good life so far,” he said, talking almost more to himself than me. “Good job, good family. Every once in a while, I look at my own children and think about Becky Bluso. My oldest daughter is a teenager now. In a couple of years, she’ll be the same age as the Bluso girl when her life was cut so short. It still all seems so unbelievable. How Becky Bluso never had a chance to live a life like I did. Like my own kids hopefully will do. Someone took all that away from Becky. Her death was a terrible tragedy.”
I tried to couch the next question as carefully as I could.
“Was there ever any indication that Becky Bluso’s death could have been connected to any other murders?”
“You mean like a serial killer?”
I was surprised at how quickly he suggested the serial killer theory.
“You don’t seem surprised by the question,” I said.
“That’s because the other reporter from New York already asked me about it.”
Of course. Marty.
“What did you tell him?”
“Same thing I’ll tell you. We never had any leads on anything like that. Of course, anything is possible. Maybe it was a serial killer who came through Eckersville a long time ago and
murdered Becky Bluso as one of his victims. We haven’t been able to figure anything else out about the murder. Why not a serial killer? We still don’t know anything about what happened to Becky Bluso that day, Ms. Carlson. Hopefully, one day we will.”
Before I went back to New York, I stopped in at the Fort Wayne newspaper to meet Eileen Nagle, the woman who had written the recent story about the Bluso murder. Nagle was in her mid-twenties, seemed ambitious and impressed that a TV journalist from New York was interested in her story. She confirmed the basic facts I already knew from that story and from my interview with Parkman, but couldn’t add many more details.
She did say that Marty Barlow had been to see her. That he told her he’d once covered the Becky Bluso story, too, when he worked at the newspaper. She said she was sorry to hear he had died.
“But why do you care so much about the Becky Bluso story?” Nagle asked.
“Marty was my friend, and he asked me to help work with him on a big story before he died.”
“And you figure you’ll solve this case now for him in his memory?”
“Something like that.”
“And exactly how do you plan to do that?”
“Beats me,” I said.
CHAPTER 20
THERE’S AN OLD newsroom adage that says the best way to be a good reporter is to have a good editor. Which is true a lot of the time. I think about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two most famous reporters in journalistic history. Without Ben Bradlee, another editor might have relegated Watergate to the unimportant police robbery story that everyone else thought it was at the beginning. We never would have heard about stuff like “Deep Throat” and “follow the money” without Ben Bradlee.
Of course, not all editors are Ben Bradlees. There’s a million jokes reporters tell about editors who do too little—or too much—to ruin a good story.
Like the joke about the reporter and the editor walking through the desert. The sun is beating down, and they’re thirsty beyond belief. Suddenly, they see an oasis ahead with water. The reporter runs to it and begins drinking the water. Then he hears a splashing sound next to him. The editor is peeing in the water. “What are you doing?” the reporter asks. “Making it better,” the editor replies.
