By Reason of Insanity (69 page)

Jay Cooper.

Something sick began crawling around in his stomach.

A downtown photographer who used young models.

He had just sent men scurrying everywhere in search of a Jay Cooper when he was called to the phone.

“Adam Kenton, from
Newstime
.”

Dimitri shook his head. He was busy.

“He says it’s urgent. About Jay Cooper.”

THUS BEGAN the biggest manhunt in New York’s history, a brief and bloody moment in the beat of the nation’s largest city. Before it was over, dozens of lives would be irrevocably changed, others ended. Careers would be ruined, some started. Two men, both hunters, yet each knowing the fear of the fox, would finally meet face to face. And an incredible mystery, forever unsolvable, would come to haunt Chess Man collectors and the general public alike.

To this day the various police files on Thomas William Bishop have never been officially closed. Nor has the actual FBI report of the investigation ever been released.

Over the years newsmen and writers of true crime would point out curiously that Jack the Ripper was never caught, and that similar or even identical murders and mutilations of females have taken place in different countries at roughly seventy-five-year intervals, about the life span of the average woman.

And there are those who still believe that on some dark and dreadful night, the demon will again flash his knife and plunge it pitilessly into private parts. They wait, just as a fearful city and anxious nation waited during those last awful weeks of November 1973.

And waited … and waited …

THOMAS BISHOP AND

ADAM KENTON

Twenty-one

FOR MOST of those two final weeks New York was turned upside down in the frantic search for Jay Cooper. Reports came in by the thousands and each one was noted and investigated. He was seen in the observation tower atop the Empire State Building, on subway platforms deep underground, in buses and cabs, theaters and restaurants and supermarkets, at Coney Island and the Cloisters, on bridges and boats and trains, even in church. At least a half dozen of them, ranging from Methodist to Buddhist. None proved accurate. He evidently wasn’t sightseeing or traveling locally or viewing shows or eating or praying, as far as anyone knew. Nor was he walking around or sitting in parks or standing on street corners. He apparently wasn’t even sleeping.

Every hotel in the city was checked for a Jay Cooper. Young men fitting the description were asked to show identification when they registered. From the Plaza and St. Regis to the welfare traps on the Upper West Side and the bottle cribs on the Bowery, from Washington Heights to Bronxville, the center of Queens to the heart of Brooklyn, all hotels were investigated. Even the rooming houses in each precinct were visited, along with religious and social shelters of every kind. Anything that housed men on a daily or weekly basis was inspected, right down to deserted warehouses along the riverfront and empty buildings in slum areas where homeless men stretched out. Neighborhood clubs were looked into, as were the back rooms of Chinese laundries. Known hoodlum hideouts were rousted, whorehouses raided. Even a carnival tent show near Kennedy Airport that used local talent for geeks and goons was searched. Jay Cooper wasn’t to be found.

Within twentyfour hours thousands of prints of Kenton’s drawing were made and quickly distributed to bars and restaurants, barbershops and banks, private massage parlors and public baths, anywhere and everywhere a man might go for food and drink or a hundred other needs. The circulars showed a pleasant-faced young man with light hair and a steady eye, a far cry from the menacing pictures of Vincent Mungo. This young man seemed most friendly and charming and obviously incapable of harming anyone. His name was Thomas Bishop, though he was known publicly as Chess Man.

In the following days many hundreds of men were stopped by police on the streets, on public transportation, in parks and sports arenas. All were asked for identification. Those who had none or who acted suspiciously were immediately seized. Their crime was that they resembled Thomas Bishop, or at least were white and not overly ugly. Most were soon released without apology, some were held for further questioning on other matters. Police were in no mood at the moment to hear about civil liberties. Or to act subtly. At the slightest suspicion that he had been spotted, at the merest rumor that he was nearby, they blanketed the area, raided premises, searched homes, accosted strangers, leveled guns at suspects. Word went out to get the job done; excuses and apologies would have to be made afterward, if at all.

Police were visible at the city’s major checkpoints: the bus terminals, especially those at Times Square and the Washington Bridge, the ferry slip for Staten Island, Penn Station and Grand Central Station, the airports, the bridges and tunnels. Roadblocks were set up on all major arteries leading to Long Island and Westchester County. The harbor patrol searched all pleasure craft, the Coast Guard took care of merchant vessels. An international incident was narrowly averted when the captain of a Rumanian cargo ship berthed in the Hudson River threatened to shoot any American who came aboard. Diplomatic fingers quickly reached halfway around the world to Bucharest but the Rumanian government was adamant in its refusal to allow a foreign inspection of its vessel. Finally a Rumanian police official was dispatched to New York, at American expense, and he conducted the examination, print in hand. The result was negative. Bishop was not aboard the
Moldavia
.

All known sex criminals in the city were visited, their homes or rooms checked, on the theory that the madman might be an acquaintance of one or more of them. High police officials recognized that these were not basically sex crimes but they were determined not to overlook any possibility, no matter how remote. Two of the sex offenders were finally held on other serious charges.

Youthful detectives frequented the city’s chess parlors, its more popular singles bars, student hangouts and frat houses, lonely-hearts gatherings, partner parties and sexual-encounter sessions—anywhere young men and women might meet. Others checked out the homosexual areas, the private clubs and baths, the gay bars, the truck stops, the pet pits and fist fairs. There was always the chance, according to some police psychiatrists, that Chess Man’s derangement stemmed from a strong homosexual identification. Local units warned prostitutes and harassed them off the streets, at least temporarily.

Female detectives were sent to model agencies, to YWCAs and other such hostels, to nurses’ quarters and convents, to wherever women congregated without men. A recurring nightmare was that Chess Man, deprived of other outlets for selecting his victims, might go berserk and enter some kind of female facility, where he would turn mass murder into wholesale slaughter.

The police department was taking no chances. Officially the position was to smother any criticism with activity. It was better, the lieutenants told the sergeants who told the rank and file, to overly react than to leave an opening. If they didn’t get the madman, and quickly, residents would begin wondering why they had a billiondollar police force in which men received high pay for semi-skilled work that others in private industry were doing for one-third the cost, and from which those same men retired after twenty years on pensions that were bigger than many New Yorkers’ working salaries. Naturally nobody wanted people thinking about such things. Which meant they had to produce, had to get Chess Man fast. It was a political thing, a power play, and the police were caught in the squeeze.

The mob had an even worse problem of credibility. They had contracted to do a job, for which they had received the initial payment. More than three months later they hadn’t yet completed the deal. Chess Man was making fools of all of them. Being true businessmen, mob leaders knew that would eventually hurt them where it counted. In the money. Something had to be done.

With the start of the massive manhunt, the mob went to work. In places the police could never go, to people the police would never know, the word was passed. The killer of women was wanted. There must be no refuge for him, no food, no rest. He had to be hounded out of hiding. In the hard underbelly of New York life, in the home of the hustle, in gambling and drugs and loan-sharking, in every racket from the garment district to the union hall, the cry was heard in every part of the jungle. Get him! He had to be found. Alive or dead, the king of the jungle wanted his head.

There was another consideration. The elderly and venerable and generally acclaimed man of most respect had been personally contacted by one of the top men in the police department. His help was needed. In this one, everybody’s neck was on the block. For certain concessions grudgingly given pursuant to a successful outcome, Mr. G. had agreed to commit his forces to battle.

No public mention was ever made of the secret meeting of course; no memos were written, no notes kept, no reporters tipped off. Since that day police spokesmen have repeatedly denied any involvement whenever the rumors are revived. But such denial is itself part of an old tradition, almost as old as the temporary mutual-aid pact worked out by two men of power on a bench in a tiny concrete park on Sullivan Street one brisk November morning. More than fifty thousand men from both sides of the coin, police and mob alike, were joined in the search.

Which left some eight million private citizens. In the days following the release of Chess Man’s new name and likeness, while police were hauling in hundreds of unlikely suspects and the mob was rousting out dozens of underworld denizens, groups of people chased hapless individuals who were said to be Bishop or were thought to look like him or act like him or talk like him or maybe just walk like him. All that was needed to start vigilante action was a rumor, a scream, a shout. Or sometimes just a word, and someone would be forced to flee for his life. In certain areas hysteria ran high. Several suspects were badly mauled by crowds before being rescued by police. One was dead on arrival at a Queens hospital. His head had been literally crushed with a baseball bat. Youthful, somewhat backward, a stranger to the neighborhood, he was not Chess Man. Nor was the young man in the Bronx, shot as he ran from a screaming woman he had just molested. In all, eight men required hospital treatment due to crowd action during those hectic weeks. None of them was Jay Cooper.

AFTER SEVEN dismembered bodies had been removed from the top floor of a commercial building on Greene Street on the cold crisp morning of November 16, Alex Dimitri stood in a corner of the second-floor loft while his men went through the routine of searching and cataloging everything. There was evidence all over the place, enough to satisfy a dozen TV cop shows. Evidence of the photography hobby, including rolls of film; evidence of the mail drop, including letters addressed to it; evidence of the answering service, of being a recent arrival in New York, of coming from a warmer climate, of being young and average in height and weight, of having light hair, of a beard, of money in the bank, of an institutional past, of a fondness for baloney sandwiches and a liking for chess. And, of course, a passion for mutilation.

What Inspector Dimitri didn’t know at that moment was that Bishop had removed all evidence of New Jersey or his new identity. He had vowed to make no more mistakes. In his wallet when he left were documents attesting to the fact that he was Thomas Wayne Brewster. The only thing old in the wallet was a picture of a rather plain woman in a severe dress, a woman whom he believed to be his mother but who looked very much like Margot Rule of Las Vegas.

“You should’ve called me yesterday,” Dimitri growled, trying to control his anger. “You had the name twentyfour hours. Maybe we could’ve got to him sooner, maybe while he was still here.”

Adam Kenton didn’t agree and told him so. It was obvious Chess Man had left at least a day earlier and probably more. The bed was cold, there were no fresh food scraps, nothing to eat in the refrigerator. The garbage was several days old. The most recent newspaper was dated Tuesday.

“Today’s Friday. If he left Tuesday or Wednesday he had plenty of time before we got onto him. Even yesterday morning would’ve given him enough time.” Kenton shook his head, perplexed. “Something tipped him off, started him running again. But what?”

“Who knew about him from your end?”

“Nobody.” Which wasn’t quite true as Kenton thought about it. George Homer had known, and probably Mel Brown and Fred Grimes. And some people in California. And he had told Mackenzie and Klemp and Dunlop and John Perrone that he knew who it was, though he hadn’t given them the name. Any one of them could have warned Bishop if— Stop it! he told himself. Nobody was in league with the maniac. That was too much even for his paranoia. “Nobody,” he repeated softly after a moment. But he resolved to watch Otto Klemp even more closely. And the rest of them too.

“You made a mistake,” Dimitri said gruffly, his finger in Kenton’s chest. “Don’t make any more.” He walked away, still angry but his mind made up. Nailing the reporter on charges of withholding information would bring only more trouble at a time when he needed good relations with the press. God only knew where the madman would lead him, and a sympathetic press was important. But if it wasn’t for that, Dimitri barked to himself on the way to the kitchen, if it wasn’t for the goddam power politics all the time he’d nail that bastard’s ass to the cross. To the goddam cross! Goddam right he would. Jesus! They almost had him.

THE
Post
, New York’s afternoon newspaper, was first on the street with the story. Radio and television were already broadcasting the news. Chess Man had been identified as Thomas Bishop and not Vincent Mungo, who presumably had been murdered four months earlier. Bishop had come to New York from Chicago as Jay Cooper. He had left California by way of Los Angeles as Daniel Long. Other aliases in between, if any, were unknown at the moment. Through exhaustive investigation local police, aided by an alert telephone operator, had been able to penetrate the latest disguise and trace Cooper to a house on Greene Street in the Soho area of lower Manhattan. He had apparently vacated it some days earlier. Left behind were the bodies of seven young women, all horribly mutilated. Six of them had been reported missing in the past several weeks. In the apartment were found sections of anatomy removed from the corpses. There was reported evidence of necrophilia and cannibalism.