Evil Season (8 page)

The private eye told DeNiro he and Jamie Wishart were old friends. Back in the day they'd even dated the same girl. Hayes said that during the summer of 2003, Jamie had wanted him to find his deadbeat dad, who owed child support.

Joyce's kids had made it clear that the investigation had nothing to do with child support; it merely had to do with Social Security, but DeNiro let it slide.

Hayes did find Robert Wishart, and he gave the son an address and phone number in Dayton. Hayes never made physical contact with the dad, but he did call him. Hayes told DeNiro that the man who answered the phone became nervous and stammered that he'd never heard of Robert Wishart.

DeNiro called Dayton police and learned that Robert Wishart did not have a criminal record. He was clean—with the exception of a parking ticket in 1993. Ohio DMV supplied DeNiro with Robert's photo, but it was faxed and the quality was not very good.

DeNiro called the landlady at the address he'd been given for Robert Wishart. She didn't have anyone living there under that name. Not legally, anyway.

“There is a squatter named Bob,” she said, and he turned out to be Wishart. Bob lived with a woman named Rose. He worked at the Salvation Army in Dayton.

The landlady said she didn't peg Bob as a violent guy, just a ne'er-do-well. He drove a truck, gambled his money, and spent his winnings on alcohol.

A sergeant with the Dayton police agreed to interview Bob Wishart at the Salvation Army and get back to DeNiro. That was done. Bob turned out to be old and frail—and he had an alibi. He was in Dayton at the time of the murder, many miles from Sarasota and his ex-wife.

 

 

On January 26, a sixty-three-year-old freelance photographer asked permission to photograph the gallery. He was granted permission to take pictures of the gallery's exterior only.

That same morning, criminalists were back inside applying luminol to the alcove walls and ceiling area, without success. Luminol was then applied to the carpet; this search bore fruit. Blood droplets were discovered in a line from the alcove to the bathroom. When the blood-revealing chemical was applied to the hallway louver, and bathroom doors, blood was revealed at both locations—blood spots that had been wiped clean, no longer visible to the naked eye. This was more evidence that the killer took his time after the murder, operated on the corpse, attempted a cleanup, staged the scene to give it style and maximize the shock value. The CSIs went to work at nine in the morning and were out by ten-thirty.

Meanwhile, criminalists Jackie Scogin and Valerie Howard were in the sally port, where they were giving the victim's car a more thorough exam. Howard lifted one fingerprint from the passenger-side visor mirror. Only two prints were found in total on and in the car; neither was of comparative value.

 

 

Officer Harry Ross was guarding the crime scene on January 27 when he was contacted by a white female who would identify herself only as Rusty. She said that back on January 23, she saw a suspicious person near Main Street and Palm Avenue. It was a black male—and not the usual vagrant who frequented that area. This was someone she hadn't seen before. Rusty asked to be contacted by an investigator and left her phone number.

Luminol and photography had been the criminalists' last tasks. Following a last once-over by Detectives Anthony DeFrancisco and Frank Puder, the crime scene was released. At eight-twenty at night, Tom Shanafelt cleared the scene and the SPD's twenty-four-hour presence at the gallery was discontinued.

Just in case the killer returned to the scene of the crime, a police surveillance camera and recording device were set up inside the gallery, looking out the front window.

After five days the surveillance experiment was discontinued. The camera and recording device were removed from the front of the gallery.

The resulting footage picked up a few curiosity seekers, and a regular visit from the Bay Plaza security guard on duty, but nothing helpful.

In the meantime Detective Jack Carter examined the victim's daily planner, but he found little of value. The January 30, 2004, entry on her daily planner had
Angels and Demons
written above the word “Library.” This was no doubt a reference to returning the Dan Brown book by that title, and not a reference to any real-life cult-type activities.

More promising was Detective Opitz's interview with Mary Jane DeGenero, the president of the Bay Plaza Association. She said that she and her husband were having coffee at the coffee shop at the corner of Palm and Main, when they encountered a fifty-nine-year-old artist named Thomas Monaghan, who said he was a good friend of Wishart's. Monaghan was quickly located and explained that Wishart had sold three of his paintings, and she owed him money. (That got the investigators' attention. Did debt equal motive?) He said that he still had a few pieces for sale at Wishart's gallery. There was a vase to the left when a patron first walked in, a wooden block with a fishing village on it. He'd last seen Wishart on either Thursday or Friday, meaning the day before or the day of the murder.

Opitz asked if Monaghan had any history of mental illness. Monaghan said it wasn't his favorite thing to talk about, but at one time he'd had depression and drinking issues. He hadn't had a drink in twenty-two years, he quickly added.

After talking to the victim's closest friends, they learned that Wishart kept a Sony camera at her gallery to take digital photos of the artwork. No such camera was found. The camera needed to be charged by a Sony power cord. To download photos from the camera into a computer, a USB cord would be necessary. Detective Opitz contacted five local camera shops to see if anyone had purchased, ordered, or inquired about any of these items. One camera store worker said there was a guy who came in asking about a digital camera. He was shown a photo of Thomas Monaghan. The guy said he looked familiar, but he couldn't be 100 percent certain.

Police tailed Monaghan for a time and learned that he had recently been evicted from his apartment, where he still kept some of his belongings in storage. Without a home he had been sleeping on the front porch of his old apartment house. His car was at Upman's Towing. Monaghan signed a waiver allowing cops to search his stuff. A polygraph exam was administered on January 29 by Jim O'Connor, of O'Connor Polygraph. During the pretest interview, Monaghan was asked what he thought had happened to Wishart. He replied that he thought “someone walked in off the street who is a psychopath.” Monaghan passed the polygraph and the shadow was discontinued.

 

 

The January 6 entry in the victim's daily planner mentioned Greg Parry and the posters Wishart wanted for her upcoming show. Of potential interest were written mentions of someone who Wishart hired to set up her website, but whom she'd eventually had to fire. No name was mentioned, however, but police recognized this as a reference to Thomas Kearney. Among Wishart's computer records was an e-mail from her son Jamie that informed her of the whereabouts of her ex-husband in Dayton, Ohio.

Detective Carter received a tip from Doug Carpenter, of Apple-Carpenter Gallery. He'd talked to a woman named Joyce Whidden, who said she, in turn, knew a man named George Danford (pseudonym), who “was infatuated with Joyce” and “Joyce thought he was scary.”

Detective Opitz spoke to Misty Whitley, who said that about a year before, a homeless man had come into her art gallery. When Whitley told him the place was closed, he became belligerent and at one point grabbed her. She threw him out of the gallery and hit him with a broom. The guy was about forty-five years old, white, with sandy blond hair. The last she saw he was departing the scene on a bicycle.

This “Bike Man” may have reappeared in the vicinity of Amy Shepherd, who said that she knew of a man—blond, forty years old, thin—who approached women on the street. This was on Main Street, only a few blocks from the murder scene. The guy would flatter a woman and try to hold her hand. He was persistent, but she'd never seen him angry.

“He rides a bike and honks his horn at people,” Shepherd explained.

 

 

On January 30, SPD criminalists submitted a variety of crime scene items to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Crime Lab. The idea was to find fingerprints that had been left on surfaces upon which fingerprints are difficult to find: paper, the victim's left shoe, eyeglasses, cut pieces of the telephone cord, and envelopes taped to the back of framed art. The criminalists submitted with the package the partial set of prints that had been taken of the victim at the autopsy. The FDLE had some positive results. Two fingerprints with comparison value were found on the taped envelope. A palm print was found on Werner Pfeiffer's artist profile card.

No other usable prints were found. The fingerprints on the envelope matched those of the victim, but the others didn't—which might have been because they were made by someone else, or just that the victim's comparison prints made at autopsy were of poor value due to skin decomposition.

The SPD also submitted a piece of carpet from the crime scene and two rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film containing images of the carpet. The FDLE found images of shoe prints in the photographs that were suitable for comparison purposes. Now they just needed shoes to compare them with. The FDLE kept copies of the photos and returned the negatives to the SPD.

Detective DeFrancisco delivered a subpoena to the Selby Public Library for the library records for a list of sixteen individuals, including George Danford and Greg Parry. The library search was unsuccessful. None of the persons of interest had withdrawn any books considered significant by investigators.

 

 

The nervousness lingered. The public remained jumpy. Imaginations took off, untethered. The mundane became sinister. Hookers reported johns with unusual tastes. Transients looking for a place to sleep, irate artists who felt their work hadn't been properly displayed, anyone who left town around the time of the murder, became homicidal maniacs. Investigators continued to hear a wide variety of theories.

One woman reported seeing a young man on Palm Avenue. Asked what was suspicious about him, she said he was exiting one of the Provenance's neighbor galleries while carrying a skateboard.

A woman named Linda Bailey reported that twice, once a couple of months before, and once on January 28, a thin black man, whom she believed to be homeless, barged into the rear office of Louise's Paperie on Main Street, where she worked, and asked to be hired to wash the front windows. The first time she didn't think anything of it, but the second time she thought,
Well, that's just the sort of thing that might have happened to Joyce.
Because of that, she reported it. Bailey was unable to give a more precise description.

Folks around the vicinity of the United Methodist Church, which was on Pineapple Avenue, complained about a tall, thin white male who was aggressively panhandling, doing his best to intimidate those who wouldn't give him money. No one knew if he arrived at the church on a bicycle.

The owners of Jack's Restaurant, located on Main Street, complained that on January 21, a week earlier, someone had broken in at night through the ceiling, but they didn't take anything.

On January 29, Detective DeFrancisco interviewed a woman who thought she was being stalked. Her name was Rita Cullanane (pseudonym). The guy was a white male, thirty-five to forty years old, with “blond short, shaggy hair.”

“How do you know he's stalking you?” DeFrancisco inquired.

“He parks his car across the street and sits there staring at my house,” Cullanane replied.

The guy drove a gray Reliant K. He always left before she could confront him. Now someone was calling her phone and not saying anything. Just heavy breathing. She saw the same guy park in front of her house another time—only, he was in a different car, a green Lincoln, which might have been a taxi.

Forty-five-year-old Elizabeth Whittington, of Omega Lane, came to the SPD's front desk to tell them that on a Thursday, during the first week of December 2003, about five weeks before the murder, she'd been invited by her friend Jo Ellen Silberstein to attend the opening of her show at the Provenance. “I met her at the dog park I go to. She told me that it was going to be a very big VIP event, with over seven hundred invitations going out.” In reality, however, there were only about ten people attending Silberstein's “retrospective” of some thirty years of work. The small attendance made Whittington feel most uncomfortable. She left quickly and, after spending a brief time in a nearby gallery, went home. After that, Silberstein became “persistent and insisted” that they “get together for meals.” As they dined together, Silberstein told Whittington that she was from a prominent Sarasota family, that her mother was very big in the city's ballet and circus. The family also owned homes in New York State. Whittington was clearly frightened by the murder, and there was a chance her imagination had gotten the better of her. Situations that might have been mildly irritating before the murder were now terrifying. She complained that since the murder she'd had “very odd people coming into” her life—a fact that had her so freaked out that she was not staying in her own home.