Evil Season (12 page)

Brutus Murphy was discharged honorably in 1981, and, largely because of the skills he'd learned while in the navy, made a seamless reentry into the civilian world. He quickly got a job in Clearwater, Florida, processing film in a darkroom.

His love life didn't suffer, either, now that he was out of uniform. On Clearwater Beach he met a beautiful woman named Mary Border. They were both in the water swimming, riding the waves.

He asked her what she did for a living and she had to answer him several times because he had water in his ears. She got right in his face and said, “I cut hair.” It was love at first sight for him. He wasn't sure how she felt about him. When they did meet, there were times when he thought she liked him, and then there were times when his insecurities took over and he thought he was just fooling himself. But she
did
like him.

She was model gorgeous, statuesque, five-ten, so tanned, naturally blond hair as golden as the Florida sunshine, very slender, and muscular.

As was true of all of his relationships, once it started, it progressed quickly. They saw each other pretty much every day. They mostly went to the beach and strolled slowly along the wade at night, so the ebb of each wave splashed across the tops of their feet.

They'd been lovers for about a month when he popped the question. He proposed in his car, which was parked just outside Fort DeSoto Park. She said yes, and they became engaged.

A couple of weeks later he bought her a ring.

He and his new fiancée moved into an apartment together at Indian Shores. It was a large complex called the Indian Pass Apartments. There were several hundred units, with a pool in the courtyard. The apartment was right across the road from Indian Rocks Beach. It was a one-bedroom unit, with a small bath, living room, and kitchen, about five hundred square feet. There was a small porch, where they could step outside and look at the water.

 

 

Brutus went to work for Reedy Photoprocess Corporation, where he maintained the film processors and printers. Reedy was comprised of two companies. The parent company was in Minneapolis, run by president Stan Reedy.

In 1980, Reedy purchased a small processing lab at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street South in Pasadena, Florida. The lab was comprised of many small rooms, with each step in the processing and printing procedure done separately. There was one room for correcting, another for processing. As custom printing was a Reedy specialty, each enlarger had its own separate room. At the end of the hallway were the “chemical mix” room on one side, where Murphy spent the bulk of his time, and the bathroom on the other. In the front there was a small area for customer pickup. The largest room was the office.

Many years later, Brutus Murphy's coworker at Reedy, Paula Burfield, had nothing unkind to say about him.

“To me, he was always sweet,” she said. “Very pleasant.”

No indications that there was anything odd, nothing a little bit off. He worked in the lab in the back and dressed casually, usually wearing a normal pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She remembered thinking at the time that he was “rather nice-looking.”

Another Reedy employee who remembered Murphy was Lynn Bushner. He was “fine. Very nice. Perfectly normal.”

She said that many of his duties were janitorial. In addition to keeping the machines in working order, he also swept up the place. Neither Burfield nor Bushner remembered Murphy ever processing film.

Murphy worked at Reedy for about six months. He enjoyed the job, but there was no money in it.

“Mary was making three times as much as I was, cutting hair,” he said.

According to him, he spontaneously quit one morning. According to his former coworkers, he was fired after getting into a “tiff” with someone.

Murphy enrolled that same day in the barber school at Sunstate Academy in Clearwater. It was his idea to make the move, but Mary supported him 100 percent. He paid his tuition by using his GI Bill money.

While attending Sunstate, Murphy's eye for the ladies began to roam again. The lover he remembered best was an emancipated seventeen-year-old named Amber.

“The sex was without delay, and it was good,” he said.

He stayed with Amber for a couple of weeks before he dumped her to go with another student. He broke off his engagement with Mary so he could pursue without guilt.

He had lived with Mary Border for a year and a half. He felt that life was filled with opportunities, and she was stifling that. She became pretty upset when he told her he needed his freedom.

Murphy sometimes still wished that he had married her.

“Absolutely gorgeous,” he reminisced.

 

 

Brutus graduated from Sunstate in March 1983. On April 6, he received his Florida barber's license. His first job as a hairstylist was in downtown St. Petersburg, working at Pedro's Tonsorial Parlor.

The parlor was not far from Jannus Landing, an open-air concert venue now known as Jannus Live. He only stayed at Pedro's for a couple of months before he found a better-paying job, working freelance at Starlight Park Barber Shop in Largo.

At the Starlight, Murphy worked for the owner, a guy named Bill Mills, and his immediate supervisor was Alia Benson. Longtime Starlight employee Gary Crowell remembered how the shop looked back then, with its light blue interior, three matching chairs, and mirrors on the back wall.

The shop was part of a strip mall at the corner of Park Boulevard and Starkey Road—a very busy intersection, sitting next to a pawnshop/jewelry store. The plaza wasn't big, but sometimes it had juicy gossip. One owner went to jail for paying a cop to kill his ex-wife.

Brutus remained at the Starlight Barber Shop until early 1984, when he and his brother, Dean, invested together in a pair of hair salons in St. Pete: A Hair Emporium. The salons—Brutus ran one, Dean the other—were top-notch, but neither location was that great. They never did make much money.

And that was the way life stayed for a few years, until Brutus was twenty-eight years old and started to feel the old wanderlust again.

Sometime during 1984, while living and working in St. Pete, Brutus Murphy raped a woman. That was the start of it: “the madness”—what Murphy would come to call his “bizarre behaviorism.”

It enveloped him and rendered him irresponsible.

That was the first time he felt his own personal Mr. Hyde persona ooze out of his psyche. He didn't know how to explain it, but a curtain closed on his normal self.

He was still in the plane, but he was no longer the pilot.

He thought maybe it was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. His conscious mind became subservient and his subconscious rose to dominance.

Murphy's neophyte madness was not the only chemical affecting his behavior.

“I was very drunk,” Murphy recalled.

He was soaring. He had a strong chemical high, “a feeling of grandiosity in my psyche that I never felt at any other time.”

He met the girl in a joint called the Crown Lounge, where they sometimes had B-list (maybe C-list) rock concerts: acts a full decade or more past the peak of their popularity.

“I brought her home and she fell asleep,” Murphy explained. “She was wearing a skirt and panty hose. I took a scissors and cut off her panty hose and then I raped her. I told her about it in the morning, and she just laughed and said it was okay. She was a really good sport about it.”

According to Murphy, she then told him that he would have to pay for his selfishness. There would be no more cutting of panty hose with scissors. He had to have sex with her again—this time so she could enjoy it. So they had a little morning delight.

 

 

It's not uncommon for American veterans to become nostalgic over their time in the service, but it was particularly bad for Murphy.

He'd had maybe the greatest-of-all-possible military experiences in Bermuda. Compared to cutting hair in strip-mall Florida, making beautiful underwater photos and dealing with top-secret film was tons more glamorous and adventurous.

He decided that the thing he needed to make his life complete was to become a Navy SEAL. Murphy sold his salon. Brother Dean kept his and continued cutting hair.

“I reenlisted in the navy for six years, and was able to reenter the service at my old rank, E5 pay grade as a photographer's mate, petty officer second class,” he said.

A few weeks into his Navy Veteran Training in Orlando, Murphy took his fitness test for the SEALs and, on the second try, passed it. To pass the test he had to swim five hundred yards in under twelve and a half minutes, do a minimum of forty-two push-ups in two minutes, fifty-two sit-ups in two minutes, and eight pull-ups (no time limit). The last stage of the test was the toughest. Wearing boots and pants, a candidate had to run a mile and a half in under eleven minutes.

After completing that training, he was sent to the Naval Special Warfare Group One and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) Training in Coronado, California. For seven months he worked as a photographer directly under the master chief of the command, a SEAL named Cliff Hollenbeck, who was a real hero, with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star to show for it. Murphy again loved the photography work because of its variety, for he took photos throughout the command, including in the SEAL Compound.

“The most interesting assignment was to go up in a CH-46 double-rotor helicopter with a bunch of SEALs and shoot photos of them rappelling out the rear of the chopper. I also photographed them fast-roping out of the bottom of the helicopter.”

Passing the fitness test entitled Murphy to enroll in BUD/S Training. This program taught SEAL candidates to be men of character, to be in top physical condition, and to learn new tasks quickly. The course lasted for six months and taught physical conditioning, small-boat handling, diving physics, basic diving techniques, land warfare, weapons, demolitions, communications, and reconnaissance.

For the first seven weeks the course concentrated on conditioning, with the fourth week aptly named “Hell Week,” which consisted of five and a half days of continuous training, with a maximum total of four hours sleep during that time. Hell Week was designed to prove to the candidates that it was possible for a man to do ten times the work that an average man would have thought possible.

The second phase of training concentrated on diving; the third on weapons, demolition, and small-unit tactics. The final three weeks were basic parachute training.

Murphy began his BUD/S Training during the winter. “I wouldn't recommend it,” he said. BUD/S Training in winter was tough because the Pacific Ocean was downright icy!

Murphy only made it four and a half weeks into BUD/S Training. “I couldn't psychologically handle being in and out of the fifty-degree water all day long,” he remembered sadly.

He preferred to think about the aspects of the training in which he did well. He handled the obstacle course with no problem. He handled the boat landing in the pounding surf. The running and the swimming—both without trouble.

“But the cold water affected me so much, I finally rang the bell, which signified that you are quitting BUD/S,” Murphy admitted.

 

 

After dropping out of SEAL training, Murphy was commanded to go to his next duty assignment in Long Beach, California, aboard the USS
Peleliu.
The ship was named after the 1944 battle in which the First Marine Division, later relieved by the Army's Eighty-first Infantry Division, cleared the Pacific island of Peleliu. The battle was supposed to last a couple of days, and ended up lasting longer than two months. It had the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific Theater, higher than either Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

The battle's namesake was a huge eighteen-story-tall amphibious assault ship. She was in dry dock when Murphy was assigned to her, and stayed in dry dock for many months, while he worked aboard as a photographer.

After what seemed like forever, the
Peleliu
finally went out to sea, but it didn't stay out there for long. After two weeks the captain determined that work on the ship was incomplete. It returned to dock.

“After a few weeks of being on the ship anchored to the dock, I decided to take drastic action,” he said. He grabbed his backpack and his Navy SEAL combat knife, which he bought off someone during BUD/S.

“I jumped ship,” he admitted. He didn't know why. “I got off work one morning and walked through the gate of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard with no intention of ever coming back. I went AWOL!”

 

 

Murphy got on a bus for downtown Los Angeles. High and euphoric, Murphy removed his military ID card from his wallet. He cut it into little pieces. He threw the pieces out the window of the moving bus. Murphy looked back at the confetti wind with a sense of profound liberation.

He was too high with adrenaline—or chemical imbalance, or whatever this new madness was—to look at reality. If he took off the delusion glasses, his reality was far more bleak.

He was beginning a four-and-a-half-month stretch during which he would live as a transient, roaming free and broke along the West Coast between Santa Monica and San Francisco. Hunger would drive him to desperation, and to crime.

He was only in San Francisco for a couple of days. For a fellow who was down on his luck, San Francisco could be an accommodating city. There were flophouses and soup kitchens.

But Murphy was so out of it, he lacked the social skills to find those places. He slept on the coast in a foxhole he carved for himself out of the brush.

 

 

The worst crime he committed during those lost months was in a campground on Half Moon Bay. In fact, it was so severe that it temporarily ended Murphy's life as a transient.

“I tried to kill a man,” Murphy explained. Again, the madness from the chemical imbalance in his brain made him do irrational and bad things—things clearly destructive to others, but self-destructive, too. Murphy said it felt like a drug, like he took too much of something and was wasted out of his mind.

“There is a dreamlike state that I am in,” Murphy said. “Things slow down. Surreal. Unreal. That's a fact!”

Half Moon Bay is twenty-eight miles south of San Francisco, between forested hills along California's most scenic coastline. It was beautiful, Murphy later said, but a place where “the winds of romance blew queerly.”

The guy—his name was never known—propositioned Murphy sexually. Murphy wasn't at all tempted. In fact, he was pissed off. So Murphy waited until the guy was asleep, attached a heavy lead weight to his combat knife case, and hit the guy in the head with it.

“I hit him as hard as I could, but it was obviously not hard enough.”

Instead of staying unconscious from the concussion of the blow, the guy woke up very startled and frightened. Murphy hit him again with the weighted case—this time in the center of his forehead. Once more, the guy withstood the blow better than Murphy would have thought possible. Murphy had given him his best shot, right between the eyes, and the guy was only stunned.

“Then he begged me to stop, so I decided to let him live,” Murphy explained.

That was as far as Murphy's compassion went. He pulled his razor-sharp combat knife from its sheath and brandished it so that the guy was good-and-properly terrified.

“I warned him if he went to the police, I would hunt him down and kill him.”

Murphy hadn't planned on the guy having a skull as thick as the hull of the
Peleliu
, and had already made plans for what to do with the corpse when the guy was dead.

“I was going to dump his body over a cliff along the coast,” he said.

Instead of killing the guy, Murphy stole his Chevy Blazer, his wallet, and his money. Without stopping, Murphy drove to the San Francisco Bay Area airport.

From there, he called his mother in Florida, and she wired him enough money for an airline ticket back home. After a few months in Florida, Murphy became fed up with the outlaw life, constantly looking over his shoulder, searching for military police (MPs) in the margins of his vision.

“I had my brother and his wife drive me to the recruit training command navy base in Orlando, Florida.” Dean let him out at the front gate.

Murphy walked up to the sentry and said, “I am Petty Officer Murphy and I am here to turn myself in for desertion.”

He stayed in Orlando for a couple of weeks, where he was free to come and go, and was allowed to socialize with other deserters. Then they put him, unaccompanied, on an airplane to Los Angeles, where he called shore patrol at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and told them that he was at the airport. He was told to wait in front of the airport. He saw an official navy car pull up and inside was a pair of armed escorts.

“You Petty Officer Murphy?” one asked.

“I am.”

Before many mildly interested witnesses in the hustling and bustling airport, Murphy was handcuffed behind his back.

He was placed in the back of the navy car and was taken to the Long Beach Shore Patrol and kept in a holding cell for a couple of hours. He was next moved back to the USS
Peleliu,
still in dry dock, and back to his former workstation in the photo lab.

“I was not confined while aboard the
Peleliu,
” Murphy said. He was even allowed to leave the ship and go on the base and return. This freedom lasted for about a week. Then he was court-martialed.

As a result of that legal ceremony, Murphy was demoted from E5 to E1, given thirty days in the brig, and given a dishonorable discharge, the grounds being “bad conduct.”

Murphy served his brig time in San Diego.

“That was my first prolonged incarceration, and it was rough,” Murphy said.

The only good thing about the brig was the breakfasts. Those meals were huge and great, and in complete contrast to everything else about the place.

Most days he and the other prisoners were taken from their cells and sent into the harbor onto one of the ships. Half the time they would scrape old paint; the other half they would be saddled with a brush, slapping on new paint.

After his month in the brig, he was released into civilian life. Within twelve hours he was in St. Petersburg, staying with his brother until he could find a job and get a few paychecks under his belt. Actually, it was more like he was living next to Dean rather than with him. The building in Largo was not a duplex, but more of a quad-plex.

The search for a job didn't take long. Murphy had a skill, cutting hair, which was always in demand. Almost immediately he was hired by a barbershop in the Gateway Mall in northeast St. Pete. “It was a really good job,” he said. “Busy location, and what made it even better was I was paid in cash daily, with a seventy-five percent commission.”

He only stayed with Dean and Dean's then-wife, Brenda, for a couple of weeks. He moved out quickly. He didn't move far, however. He ended up renting the apartment right next door to them.