Evil Season (19 page)

On January 16, 2004,
that
day, Murphy was doing most of his talking to Jesus. As he looked back on it, Jesus sounded like Charlton Heston, the way the actor sounded in
The Ten Commandments.
That sounded like a joke, but Murphy couldn't be more serious.

“Jesus said, ‘Today's the day. Today you rape and kill,'” Murphy explained. Jesus told him to go to downtown Sarasota because it was there where opportunity awaited him.

It was like that all morning. Jesus was talking to him even as he prepared his breakfast: sausages, eggs, toast, glass of juice, and a cup of coffee.

Murphy quietly chewed a piece of crust and said, “Forgive me, Jesus, if I misinterpret what you are saying. You want me to kill a woman today, right?”

“Yes,” Jesus replied. “You are a god like me and you can kill.”

Murphy had given up on God twenty-three years before—at age twenty-three—half his life before. Now he was a god among many gods. And he still felt subservient. Now he had to please and appease the voices—whether it be Jesus or the gaggle of crabby gals that usually inhabited his gray matter—just as he had once tried to keep the collective happy.

He had no choice. He had to do what the voices said or they would drive him crazy. So, at about ten-thirty in the morning, he got on his bike and pedaled the twenty-minute ride to downtown Sarasota. He took a left at the end of the driveway, and another left on Fruitville Road, which he took into downtown.

He had only been in that neighborhood once before that he could recall, and he didn't recognize the street names.

“I chained my bike to a pole just a couple of doors away from a combination coffee shop and bookstore,” Murphy said. He went in, browsed for fifteen minutes, and had a second cup of coffee.

From the bookstore he walked to the marina and wandered around, looking at the boats. The voices screamed at him, furious now:
“You are stalling, so get on with it!”
Henpecked into action, he walked back downtown to where he'd left his bike. When he first saw his bike, right where he'd chained it, so beautiful, he paused for a moment to admire it. When he looked up, his eyes fell on a place called the Provenance Gallery.

One voice in his head, a solo voice amidst the chorus, said,
“There's a possibility.”

Murphy was dressed in his nicest clothes: a pair of black dress slacks, a green short-sleeved dress shirt, and black leather shoes. He was dressed to go undercover, to play the part of an art buyer in a real-life drama of life and death.

He carried his black backpack, the kind that had only one strap that went over the left shoulder and buckled at the right waist. Murphy walked diagonally across the street toward the Provenance's front entrance.

 

 

His memories are like a dream—so vivid, yet unreal. He entered the gallery and there was a woman, in the back, and she started to walk—a little bit jerky like stop-motion animation—in his direction.

Murphy took his attention off the woman for a heartbeat and glanced at the front door's lock. It was his lucky day. There was a dead bolt, with a flipper on the inside, so he wouldn't need a key to lock the door from inside. He was thinking,
How convenient,
when he returned his gaze to the approaching woman.

He remembered her wearing pants, a loose-fitting top, and cloth shoes. He was almost forty-seven, and she seemed a little bit older, he thought. He liked her hair. He liked her build.

She wasn't too fat at all. Or too skinny. She was “shapely in a feminine sort of way”—and he found her attractive.

Murphy's eyes searched the joint. He saw no evidence of other employees. There was good reason to believe the woman was alone.

She could be the one.

The voices said,
“Yes! Yes! This is the one! Time to rape and kill.”

“Can I help you?” the woman asked. Her tone was so pleasant. She never did give him her name.

Murphy realized right then that the voices, for all of their pestering, had never been specific about what his victim should look like. They hadn't specified a particular age, build, or hair color. The only specification was that she be an “attractive woman.” Other than that, Murphy felt free to pick and choose.

Yes, this was the one.

“Yes, you may,” Murphy said. “I'm interested in buying some art, perhaps a painting, for my new home.”

“Is there anything in particular that you were looking for?” She was perfectly charming.

“No, not in particular,” Murphy said. “If you'll show me around, I'd appreciate it. If I see anything of interest, I'll let you know.”

“Okay, let's look around,” she said.

She showed him around the gallery, discussing pieces of art that she found interesting, or perhaps thought he might like. They began to tour at the front of the gallery and worked their way back. At last, they were just about all the way back, in an alcove off to the side, where they couldn't be seen from the street.

Murphy thought,
If I do kill her, this is where I will do it.
It was not a voice in his head that said this. He was thinking for himself here.

Another factor to his advantage. Inside the alcove there were paintings that weren't hung on the wall, just sort of stacked up, so he had to follow the woman deep into the alcove to look at the art that was on the floor.

And Murphy did . . . nothing. He wasn't ready. He needed more time to build up his courage. And that meant a drink. He decided to go to a bar and get half wasted, then return to the Provenance.

He told her that he liked one painting, a nude of a lovely blond woman, but he was still undecided. He was going to continue his tour of the area's galleries. If he didn't see anything he liked better, he would return for the painting.

The woman said that would be fine. “We're open till five,” she said cheerfully.

As Murphy exited the gallery, he became extremely excited. He finally had found someone, an opportunity!

In part, he'd been telling the woman the truth. He really did want to tour the other galleries, but he wasn't shopping for art. He was shopping for opportunities even more desirable than those presented by the woman in the Provenance Gallery.

He visited every gallery on the strip, and he failed to find anything that came even close. The lady in the Provenance was uniquely vulnerable.

As Murphy put it, there was only one “open invitation to murder.” There it was: the future title of the movie about his life.

With his tour of galleries complete, Murphy retreated to a small tavern only a half block from the coffee shop/bookstore.

“I was there for maybe an hour and a quarter. I had a cheeseburger and french fries, three beers, and a scotch on the rocks,” Murphy remembered. He was feeling better, but still not good enough to murder.

He skipped out on the bill, easy to do as they were changing shifts, and walked to another bar on the next block. He had two more beers.

After his second beer, the bartender asked him to leave. Murphy didn't remember the specifics, just that he was feeling pretty good, half wasted, and said something the bartender found offensive. It could have been
anything.

 

 

It was going on five in the afternoon and Murphy was ready to return to the gallery. He concluded that closing time was the best for making his move. If his gods were with him, maybe no customers would show up. He waited until the appropriate moment and entered the gallery.

The woman was in the back again, and Murphy took the opportunity to flip the flipper on the front door's lock. The door could no longer be opened from the outside. He flipped the flipper, using only the sides of his fingers so as not to leave identifiable prints.

He walked to the back of the gallery, anonymous. The woman was almost in the perfect position, just outside the desirable alcove. If he could get her to move just three feet into the alcove, they would be invisible to outsiders.

“I'm back!” Murphy called out. “I came to buy the painting.”

“Great,” the woman replied. She stepped into the alcove to retrieve the nude of the blond woman.

Murphy followed her in. He had his backpack over his left shoulder, with the zipper partially open for easy access to his combat knife. The woman smiled as she lifted the painting and held it up for her customer to see.

He didn't even like that painting. It just seemed like a painting that a guy might like if he wasn't part God. He thought the painting was amateurish. He didn't like any of the paintings in the entire gallery.

But she believed he loved the painting, and that was all that mattered. The ploy worked perfectly. “She fell for it . . . literally,” Murphy recalled.

Later he would suppose that there must have been classical music playing, since the music was playing when the body was found, but he didn't remember hearing it. He only remembered the sounds the woman made.

Murphy pulled the knife out of his backpack. He stepped forward and held the knife in the woman's face. Her smile was replaced by a taut grimace of terror.

He could see the panic in her eyes.

“Do as I say or I will kill you,” Murphy said. “Drop the painting to your right.”

She did as she was told. He pushed her back and shoulder blades into the gallery wall. They were now in the perfect position, invisible to the outside world.

“I held the knife to her throat. I didn't say a word as my left hand first found her left breast and then her right,” Murphy recalled. He thought how good those breasts felt, even through her clothing.

Years later, Murphy still lapsed into a pornographic rapture as he recalled the details of the sex attack, how he forced a hand inside her pants and vaginally penetrated her with a middle finger. He liked the feeling that gave him.

He withdrew, removed his hand, and grabbed her by her right arm. With the knife still to her throat, he directed her to move forward a few feet away from the wall.

Murphy reached inside his backpack with his left hand and removed a long men's stretch sock.

“Put your arms behind your back!” Murphy said, using his command voice.

She complied and he attempted to tie her wrists together with the sock.

“You can't do this,” the woman complained. “It hurts my shoulders.”

For some reason that statement made Murphy extremely angry. He cursed her. A voice in his head said,
“Kill her!”

“Without a second of hesitation I lifted the knife away from her throat, stepped to her left side, and drove the knife very deep into her back between her shoulder blades.” He pulled the knife out and then stabbed her again, just as deeply, very close to the first wound.

She began screaming loudly, so he threw her once again into the wall, where she hit her back. He must've tried to stifle her screams with his hand; because the next thing he knew, she was biting down hard on a knuckle on his left hand, drawing blood. He already had a cut on that finger from a haircutting incident a few days earlier; the old wound opened, along with the new, until he was bleeding pretty good—spilling key evidence onto the scene.

The bite to his knucklebone made Murphy berserk with rage. He stabbed the woman repeatedly on the top of her head. He put her up against the wall again and let go, so that she slid downward. He continued the attack, with her on the floor.

“I knew that she had to give up her soul,” Murphy commented.

He had an “overwhelming sense of immortality and exhilaration.” Never before in his entire life had he felt that way. (And never would he again.)

He saw her eyes go vacant. He grabbed her by the feet and adjusted her, so that she was just right on the floor.

“Well done,”
said the voices in his head.
“Now rape her! Rape her!”

He pulled off her shoes; as he did so, he noticed that his finger was still bleeding. In the bathroom he washed the blood from his hands.

There was a fax machine on a desk in another of the alcoves. He used his combat knife to cut the cord so there would be no interruptions.

He returned to the woman, grabbed her pants legs and pulled down her pants. He removed them. He retrieved scissors from his barbering tools, which he had in his backpack, and used them, expertly snipping away like the professional cutter that he was, opening up the woman's shirt and bra.

“Her breasts were nice and shapely, among the best I've ever seen,” Murphy commented.

He used the scissors to cut off her panty hose.

He remembered that sex lesson from so many years before, when he lost his virginity on a picnic table at the Fisheating Creek Campground.

He pulled her legs open until they formed a right angle on the floor. Murphy gazed happily at her “womanly place.”

The woman's voice in his head said,
“You have conquered her. Now you can do whatever you like to her. Go ahead. Taste her!”

He did.

“Rape her!”
the voices said. He pulled down his own pants and he tried, but “my body wouldn't cooperate.” He shouldn't have had those last two beers. There was a time when he could drink all night and still get the job done with a woman, but age had taken its toll.

He had just managed to get his pants back up, when the voices in his head let him know how unhappy they were. He wasn't through with the woman yet.

“Cut off her head! Cut off her head!”
the voices echoed urgently.

He tried to comply, and again he failed. He cut at the neck, deeper, deeper, until he hit the spine. Then his knife would go no farther. His knife was sharp as a razor, too, but not a match for bone. Her head wasn't going to come off. He gave up.

“Cut her between her legs,”
the voices commanded.
“Cut it out and take it with you.”

Murphy went to the very back of the gallery and found a plastic bag.

“I returned to the woman and I removed a pizza pie–shaped section of her womanhood and placed it into the plastic bag,” Murphy recalled.

Police would later put forth the theory that the body was posed. That it was supposed to represent a work of art, that there had been an attempt to make the body resemble a framed piece that was nearby. He laughed every time he heard that.

“The police have been reading too many crime novels,” Murphy theorized.

Police would one day say that he purposefully placed her hand so that it was indicating a copy of
Sarasota Magazine,
to an article called “A Fine Madness.” Murphy would like us to believe that was another coincidence, or perhaps the mad part of his brain operating without the sane part realizing it. (He insists that he wished he
had
done it on purpose, because the article's title magnificently described his state of mind on January 16, 2004.)

If it was art, and Murphy was willing to consider the possibility, so be it. It wasn't him creating it. There was this and other reasons to believe Murphy's gods were overseeing these events. How else to explain one physical improbability?

“Throughout the stabbing and the cutting of the woman, not once did I get any of her blood on me anywhere, not on my hands, not on my clothes,” Murphy said.

Was it a miracle? Murphy said he didn't believe in luck. “Let's just say I was
fortunate.
”

He put the plastic bag containing the woman's flesh into his backpack. He found the woman's purse and dumped out its contents. The only money she had was in her wallet, and there wasn't much. Maybe $50 in all.

“I looked at her driver's license and that was the first I knew her name, Joyce Wishart. Now I had a name for the woman I had been so intimate with.”

He swiped her wallet and an expensive digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. The wallet and camera went into his backpack. Murphy claimed he took the victim's keys, which had spilled from her purse, but police reports seemed to indicate he left the keys behind. Perhaps the victim had her office keys and her car keys on separate chains.

For reasons he didn't understand, Murphy grabbed the OPEN/CLOSED sign that went on the front door and he ripped it, and threw it onto the bathroom floor. He unlocked the front door from the inside, making sure that no one was coming, and stepped outside. He went through the woman's keys until he found the one for the front door; then he locked up.

He put the keys in his pocket and walked casually across the street to his bicycle. He unlocked it and rode away. He was surprised to learn that he'd only been inside the gallery for about a half hour.

He took Cocoanut Avenue north to Fruitville Road, took another right and rode all the way to Shade Avenue. In twenty minutes he was home.

 

 

Murphy put the bagged wedge of vagina flesh in a second plastic bag; then he put the whole bundle in the rooming house's freezer. He planned on keeping the flesh as a souvenir.

Then, with disappointment, he realized it wasn't going to work. Someone had been stealing food from him out of the refrigerator, and a communal freezer might not be the safest place for his treasure.

He removed the bag from the freezer. It wasn't as messy as you might think. Murphy said there was no blood on it.

“It was just like a fish fillet,” he said. “A flat piece of flesh.”

Using a pair of his barber scissors, he cut the flesh into small pieces. “I did it in my room, over a paper plate and a piece of paper towel,” he explained.

When he was done, he took everything—plate, towel, and chunks of flesh—into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, the same toilet that his landlady had been bending over when he goosed her.

In his room he cut up the contents of Joyce Wishart's wallet, cut all of her credit cards, cut her driver's license, cut up the wallet itself.

He went for a ride on his bike and threw away all of the items that might connect him with the Provenance Gallery. He tossed the bits and pieces away, one at a time. He even took the keys off the key ring and threw them away, one at a time.

With that done, he wrapped up his combat knife in a piece of newspaper and threw it into the bottom of a nearby Dumpster. He hung on to the camera.

For the next few days after the murder—it was the long weekend with the Martin Luther King Day holiday—he was glued to the TV, watching the news. He read the newspapers, cover to cover, looking for an article, a mention, something regarding Joyce Wishart and the Provenance Gallery.

It seemed like a full week went by before the story finally made the news—and when it hit, it hit big!