Stalking Susan (2 page)

Then he pulled me close to whisper in my ear. “Be careful on this one.”

I shrugged. “I’m always careful.” But that wasn’t exactly true, and he knew it.

“This is a bad unsub,” he told me. “Unsub” is cop talk for “unidentified suspect.” I love cop talk. “Real bad,” he said again for emphasis.

“They’re all bad,” I replied.

“But this one might be a cop.”

Before I could press him further about this juicy little nugget, Garnett grabbed his briefcase and his greasy popcorn and left me alone in a dark theater in St. Paul. Holding a cold case file.

CHAPTER 2

A
garbage man found Susan Chenowith’s body in the alley behind a two-million-dollar mansion on Lake Harriet. The date was November 19, 1991. The sky was more dark than light that morning. He put the brakes on his twenty-five-ton rig and got out to examine the bundle blocking his route. His breakfast beat the sun up that morning. The garbage man staggered to a back door. Began pounding. Then he heaved again.

The crime scene photos made me flinch as I paged through the file, now spread across my desk at Channel 3. I shut my office door so the rest of the newsroom wouldn’t see what I was working on. The photos were in color as well as black and white. The color pictures were to preserve evidence: the crime scene and the body as it actually looked when it was discovered. The black-and-white copies were backup, in case the murder went to trial and the judge ruled color to be too inflammatory for the jurors—an argument defense attorneys routinely make.

Susan Chenowith’s discolored face and protruding tongue screamed strangulation. I scanned the death certificate and read the words “asphyxia” and “homicide.”

Susan was twenty-six years old. She worked the day shift as a waitress at Peter’s Grill, a landmark Minneapolis diner that serves comfort food to downtown crowds. On that salary she still lived with her parents in south Minneapolis. Her parents told investigators she had never come home after her shift. It wasn’t typical for her to stay out all night, but it sometimes happened. So they hadn’t worried about her—until it was too late to worry about her.

Dark hair. Blue eyes. But no beauty. Certainly not now, but not even before her fatal encounter. I picked up a snapshot the cops probably showed witnesses as they tried to retrace her final steps. On her best day, Susan was fairly ordinary looking. That might explain why no one reported seeing her after she got off her shift. People tend to remember beauty or the beast. Folks in between can count on a degree of invisibility. Good for villains; bad for their victims.

The medical examiner’s report detailed bruising around her vagina and concluded she had been raped even though no semen was found. No semen meant no DNA. If the killer had left a little something behind, this might have been a whole different case. Garnett could have sent a sample to the state crime lab, where nearly forty thousand felons have their DNA on file. And not voluntarily either. DNA is a biological blueprint that can lead to a name, which can lead to an arrest, which can lead to a conviction. Hell, without semen, the cops can’t even be sure the killer is male.

Susan died wearing Kmart clothes. I don’t mean they were necessarily bought at Kmart, but they looked like average, run-of-the-mill clothes. The kind Martha Stewart wouldn’t be caught dead in. Tan pants made of a poly-cotton blend. I examined a photo that showed a full body shot. There was a dark stain, maybe blood or maybe mud, near her crotch. A royal blue button was missing from her brown and blue striped sweater. Her shoes were black loafers. The police report noted a shoulder bag found near her body held a black skirt and white shirt, which her mother explained she always changed into at work.

Garnett had run a search under her name and date of birth. An NCIC search. That’s a national crime identification computer that can call up a national rap sheet. Criminals can run from their past, but they can’t hide from it. Her name came up blank. No drugs. No prostitution. No criminal record whatsoever. Susan Chenowith stayed away from trouble, but trouble had found her anyway.

E
XACTLY ONE YEAR
later, a man walking his dog found Susan Moreno’s body slumped against a small pine tree near the beach on Lake Calhoun. She wore a raincoat over a short denim skirt and a purple tank top with spaghetti straps.

A vice cop was the last known person to see her alive. Nine hours earlier, he had stopped her for soliciting near the corner of Franklin and Chicago. He ordered her into the backseat of an unmarked car, but she raced off, disappearing into the Phillips neighborhood, a run-down part of town frequented by runaways. Each block has
CONDEMNED
signs on deteriorating duplexes with peeling paint and broken glass. That doesn’t stop squatters from moving in when they need a temporary place to crash.

Many of the residents are Native American, drifting back and forth between the poverty here and the poverty on the reservations in northern Minnesota. Children in the Phillips neighborhood have a higher incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome and lead poisoning than anywhere else in the state. Many skip school. The ones who don’t, show up for the free lunch, not the free education.

Susan Moreno’s rap sheet was long for a teenager. Prostitution. Theft. Drugs. I searched through the pile of papers and found her juvenile mug shot. Sixteen years old with tangled blonde hair. A hard life, but a soft smile. The crime scene photos were a harsh contrast. This Susan had also been strangled. Her face was Viking purple and she had some sort of ligature around her neck. Her eyes were rolled back into her head. One photo showed a close-up of a tattoo on her shoulder. Susan         
         Sam.

Sam seemed like a good place to start. The police apparently agreed. I flipped through several sheets about a man named Sam Fox, age twenty-three. Arrested for burglary, assault, drugs, DWI. Damn. I felt like crumbling the pages when I got to the part about him being in jail on the date of the murder. November 19, 1992. No alibi is as ironclad as a man behind iron bars. The cops had interviewed him anyway. They noted he seemed saddened and stunned by his girlfriend’s death. He had no idea who might have wanted her dead.

Neither did her father. He hadn’t seen her for four months, and then only because she’d drifted back home one afternoon looking for money. I read a brutal line in the investigative report where her dad told police, “The street swallowed her up because she was unholy.”

Most likely she had fallen victim to a violent john. With no public outcry, police are less likely to devote resources to low-life cases. A fact of the street.

Susan Moreno had also been sexually assaulted before she was murdered. Again, no semen. She was wearing a leopard print thong under her skirt, but no bra under her tank top. I shuddered as I read that her matching bra was actually the murder weapon. Occasionally the forensic guys can pull a print off skin, but it was hours too late for that in either of the
SUSAN
cases.

In both of the murders, police recovered microscopic fibers on the victims’ clothing, but analysis of the fibers showed them to be different so they couldn’t link the two cases. Without a suspect for comparison purposes, the fiber evidence was fairly useless. As years passed, the murderer or murderers were likely to buy new cars, move to different apartments, tear out old carpet, and destroy any forensic connection they once had with their victims.

These murders were also difficult to solve because the police had only one crime scene in each case, yet clearly more than one crime scene existed. What the cops actually had was the body disposal site. The Susans had been killed elsewhere, the bodies transported in motor vehicles. That meant possibly two additional crime scenes that might have yielded better evidence, if only they’d been located.

I’d covered enough murders and read enough crime manuals to know that homicide cops classify murderers two ways: organized and disorganized. This was an organized killer, able to plan, escape, and keep his mouth shut. The homicide closure rate is much easier with disorganized killers, who typically leave loads of clues in one place and will often confess when confronted.

I set the papers down, feeling energized for the first time in months.
SUSAN
had stopped being a file and started being a story. A compelling story even if I didn’t find any new evidence. A story could bring tips. Tips could bring answers. The beauty of that, then you had another story. I glanced at my watch, checking the date. October 17, 2007.

I started writing the story in my mind.
“A deadly anniversary is approaching.”

I charted the cases with black marker on white boards.

In life, the victims didn’t seem to have had much in common beyond their name. A sixteen-year-old hooker versus a twenty-six-year-old waitress. One blonde, the other brunette.

In death, however, the two women shared much. Under each name, I wrote the murder clues:

Another parallel seemed obvious: both women had disappeared from one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods; both were dumped in one of the city’s wealthiest. Maybe the killer was trying to send a message.

CHAPTER 3

T
he vocabulary of TV news tends to be morbid. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the philosophy in many newsrooms for determining which story gets the best play. To name a story is to “slug” it. Unwanted silence during a newscast is “dead” air. If you don’t want any audio, you “kill” the sound. Unedited videotape is called “raw.” To edit it, you “cut” it. And you don’t just take pictures of something, you “shoot” it.

I headed for the tape “morgue,” the archive where television stations store old news tapes. Even without that name, it’s a spooky place. Especially at night.

Usually the only video that gets saved are the scenes that actually make it on the air, a fraction of what is shot each day. The raw tapes are recycled after a week, used over and over again until they’re too ragged to shoot new stories on. Tape costs money, so news directors are always pressuring reporters, producers, and photographers to dump used tapes back into circulation. Typically the only tapes spared are those the station attorney has decreed must be packed away for years in case of a lawsuit. These are often sensitive, sometimes sensational, investigative stories we might need to defend in court someday. I’ve got about thirty boxes of tapes and notes stashed away, but I haven’t been sued yet. That gives the newsroom bean counters a false sense of security, so occasionally they try to get their hands on those tapes and I have to rat them out to our lawyer.

Every once in a while an enterprising video editor bucks the system and starts a tape box for big stories, or little stories that might get big. After all, it would be a bummer to find that a serial killer has been piling up corpses while the cops kept quiet; but it would be an even bigger bummer to find out that the only video your newsroom has of the murders is a couple of fifteen-second shots of a body bag surrounded by police tape. Or worse, a couple of fifteen-second shots of a wooded area surrounded by police tape. Or even worse than that, fifteen-second shots of boring cop cars parked on the street.

I knew that was about all I’d find in the on-air tape, so I was hoping for raw tape. Besides providing more video for my story, raw tape might contain clues from the crime scenes. About five years ago, I got lucky and found raw tape of the funeral of a family killed in a house fire. When police arrested the arsonist a year later, bingo, I matched his mug to one of the mourners.

If bystanders gather at a murder scene, the police routinely photograph the crowd because they know killers sometimes become gawkers.

It was a long shot, but I scanned the back shelves for a cardboard box with a promising label. I’m no intern—I never expected a box labeled
SUSAN MURDERS
to jump out at me, and it didn’t. But I didn’t find anything even remotely promising, like
LAKE HARRIET HOMICIDE
or
FRANKLIN AVENUE HOOKER.

The light was dim; tape morgues don’t get windows. They’re typically basement corners, or interior storage rooms nobody else wants. Invariably, they have bad fluorescent lighting that buzzes and cuts in and out. After about fifteen minutes, my eyes ached. I was ready to reach for the doorknob when I noticed a battered box on a top shelf.
IRON RANGE FIREBOMB.
It was dated well over a year ago.

Suddenly I felt a chill, as if I was standing in the county morgue amid dead bodies, not dead tapes. I never covered the firebombing story, yet I was familiar with it, like almost every journalist in the country.

No surprise the box existed. After all, the story had won nearly every award in broadcast news from Peabody to Emmy to Murrow. Big-bucks political consultants were using it as a textbook case to teach their clients how not to act in front of TV cameras.

As I pulled the box from the shelf I knew that, for me, it was Pandora’s box.

R
AW TAPE CAN
trigger raw emotions. Top-notch TV news producers know this. They use that power to move viewers to tears. I had been in the business long enough to know that if I put that firebombing tape in a video viewing machine, thirty seconds later I just might be the one reaching for a tissue, bawling my eyes out.

I carried the box down the hall to a closet-sized room and shut the door. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t late at night and the newsroom wasn’t empty, except for a college student hired to listen to the police scanners and dispatch a sleepy photographer at the first sign of spot news. Inside the box I found a dozen videotapes. I was interested only in one.

I put it in the viewing deck and hit
play
. The tape began to roll.

The camera is on Minnesota governor Rocky Johnson. Voters love Governor Johnson almost as much as the camera does. He’s a large man with thick wavy hair and a professional smile. But he’s not just a pretty political face: his background made him electable and his charm appears to be the ticket to making him reelectable.

Governor Johnson didn’t avoid Vietnam like some politicians. He trained as a Green Beret, though he’s fuzzy on whether or not he actually saw combat. The media has pretty much had to take his word for it, because a 1973 fire at an army storage center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroyed rooms of military records, including his.

The election is a few months away. On the tape he exudes the confidence of an incumbent and front-runner. The previous week’s poll put him fifteen points ahead of his challenger, Lester Muller, a family farmer from southern Minnesota with character but no charisma. So far his campaign slogan, Les Is More, had earned him less support and more ridicule.

Free publicity is on Governor Johnson’s itinerary today. A Channel 3 camera crew is following him, shooting cover of backslapping and baby kissing for a behind-the-scenes campaign piece. Governor Johnson is touring the newly opened Iron Range Regional Center, which he touts as a “cooperative venture between public and private forces.” The Iron Range covers much of northeastern Minnesota. Since mining went bust, the area’s future is financially bleak. But the Range got a fat government grant for this “building of the future,” and Governor Johnson is here to take credit. It’s a shrewd political move because the Iron Range is the strong arm of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

There’s a saying in state politics: as goes the Iron Range, so goes the election. The Range was the last area in Minnesota to switch from hand-counted ballots to electronic tabulation. Because of that, their returns always came in last. The joke was, the Rangers are still waiting to see how many votes they need.

The Iron Range Regional Center is located outside the small town of Finland, population 603. Rugged and isolated, it’s in one of the last parts of Minnesota to be settled. Immigrants from the old country founded it in the late 1890s and kept the name so they’d never forget their roots. The town’s biggest attraction before the Iron Range Regional Center was a purple and green wooden statue of Saint Urho who, legend has it, chased the grasshoppers out of Finland.

The Center houses a day care center, a senior center, a coffee shop, a barbershop, a bait shop, and a county licensing bureau where folks can get marriage licenses, auto licenses, boat licenses, fishing licenses, and, most important, hunting licenses. In northern Minnesota, every pickup truck has a gun rack and the right to bear arms is the only right anyone within a hundred miles gives a damn about.

Governor Johnson is greeting veterans at a reception in the senior center. A thin old man in a loose-fitting World War II uniform offers him a moose burger and they kid each other about war. The governor gives the crowd the standard “All veterans are heroes and our nation must never forget them.” The camera pans the knotty pine-paneled room as the vets applaud. The décor is early hunting lodge: deer and moose heads mounted on the walls along with Minnesota’s state fish, the walleye. Governor Johnson pauses between handshakes to point his thumb and forefinger at the head of a twelve-point buck. “Bang, bang, bang,” he says. “Get you next season.”

The camera catches Sergeant Hugh Boyer, the governor’s bodyguard and driver, breaking his usual stoic stance to roll his baby blue eyes.

I rewound the tape and watched it again. Boyer and I shared enough off-the-record chats about Governor Johnson that I know that he knows the governor is so very full of shit. The only one who doesn’t know that is the governor. Even so, Boyer should be smarter than to let it show in public.

Boyer used to be the state’s top highway crash investigator and having him babysit Governor Johnson was a waste of talent. He was temporarily drafted for the bodyguard job a year earlier when the gov’s main muscle got caught driving drunk one weekend. The State Patrol bosses suspected that Boyer was a media source, though they preferred to call it violating the Minnesota Data Practices Law, an act punishable by a thousand-dollar fine and up to ninety days in jail.

“They’re just doing this to flush you out,” I told him. “They’ll set you up with an irresistible but fake tip to see if it shows up during sweeps month. Then they’ll have the proof that you’re a leak.”

“You’re probably right, Riley,” he said to me. “But it’s a chance to get out of writing up fatals for a few months.”

Protecting the state’s highest elected official is just a minor duty of the Minnesota State Patrol. Their most visible role is cracking down on speeders, but officers also investigate fatal traffic accidents. Boyer, their best accident reconstructionist, could read skid marks like a TV anchor could read a teleprompter.

We had met four years earlier after a rock star’s stretch limo hit a school bus. I could see how tracing small body outlines in chalk on blacktop roads might start to wear on a guy, but I was still sore when Boyer decided that the best way to avoid being caught leaking stuff to the media was to stop leaking stuff to the media.

On the tape, the governor moves down the hall. So does the camera. A sign reads
BILL’S BARBERSHOP
. The shot is wide and wobbly because the photographer, Chuck Hudella, is trying to get ahead of the group by walking backward. He doesn’t notice, in the far corner of the screen, Governor Johnson carelessly giving press secretary Poppy Jones a little squeeze on the ass. Bodyguard Boyer apparently does and gives a slight shake of his head toward the governor, who responds by briefly flashing what looks like his middle finger. None of this made news because what happens later on the tape made everything else irrelevant.

The governor gives a high five to a three-year-old boy getting a crew cut. The kid is perched on a board across the top of the barber chair. Suddenly the boy slides out of frame as an explosion rocks the room.

The camera shuts down briefly. Screams are the only thing heard when the tape rolls again. It’s dark and dusty.

“What’s goin’ on? Anybody know what’s goin’ on?”

I can’t see who is yelling, but I recognized Chuck’s voice. The old-time photog had a reputation among the reporters at Channel 3 of being difficult to work with because he disliked using a tripod—a fault that sometimes resulted in shaky stand-ups. Stubbornly, he’d brace his elbow on the hood of a car and call himself a human tripod. But no cameraman’s shoulder could have withstood that blast.

I easily pick Chuck’s voice out of the din, louder than the others, because he’s closest to the microphone. “You people, clear out.” Somehow he manages to keep the camera rolling.

Boyer pushes the governor into the hall. “Move it.” His deep command echoes through the pandemonium. Barber Bill is carrying his young customer. The little boy’s face is bleeding, his haircut half finished. “Everyone, keep moving.” Boyer’s voice grows urgent. My heart starts to beat faster.

They are about fifteen yards away from the door and their escape when a wall caves in. More dust. More screams. High-pitched and frantic. The camera swings wildly. Under a pile of debris I see Poppy Jones’s shapely ass, but not much else of the press secretary.

“Back.” Boyer coughs. I can’t see him because of the heavy dust.

The governor knocks the old veteran down as he tries to move farther from the rubble.

“My hip!” the old man cries.

The camera follows Governor Johnson around a corner. A young woman is surrounded by children—none looks older than five. She’s holding two kids in her arms and more are pressed against her legs.

“The day care’s on fire!” Her face is streaked with dirt and tears. The children, wide-eyed, tremble.

Boyer, still broad and strong from his days as a high school line-backer, heaves the old veteran over his shoulders. He motions for everyone to head in the other direction to the senior center. As they move down the hall, sunlight from a picture window shines through smoke.

“Stop,” the day care woman cries. “Becky’s missing. There’s supposed to be nine kids. We’ve got to go back.”

“Which way?” Boyer asks.

The governor shoves him. “We can’t go back, we have to get out.”

“You get them out. I’ll find the little girl.” I note the nonnegotiable tone in his voice. Gently, Boyer sets the old vet down and makes a promise. “I’ll come back for you.”

“No! You have to stick with me.” The governor thrashes his arms. His speech turns shrill and desperate, almost on the verge of a tantrum. “It’s your job to get me out. So go do your job.”

Boyer pushes him against the wall and a rifle from a Civil War display about the First Minnesota Volunteers falls down. “You want out. I’ll get you out.” He picks up the antique firearm and smashes the window, then knocks Governor Johnson backward through the broken glass. The ground is about twenty feet below.

He instructs barber Bill and the day care lady to lower the kids out the window. My throat tightens as Boyer disappears back into the smoke.

“Hurry.” The woman sobs. “She’s only two.”

The tape continues to roll on chaos and confusion as the kids are dropped outside. “Run,” the grown-ups tell them. “Get away from the building.”

“Him next.” Chuck puts his camera on the floor to help lower the old vet down. They don’t realize he’s already in cardiac arrest. For the next ten seconds, all I see are feet.