The Professor and the Prostitute (11 page)

Plotegher was frightened. He called Jewell over to look at the items, and the friends conferred. It was clear that the things were ghastly. But should they report them? If they did, mightn't they be accused of some kind of foul play? Nervous, the two men decided to put the plastic bag back into the trash barrel, leave the rest area, and continue their search elsewhere. But after a couple of hours Plotegher's conscience started to bother him. Suppose some dangerous criminal was on the loose? Determined to do what was right, he went home and telephoned the State Police at Foxboro to report what he'd seen.

A young state trooper named Paul Landry was the first of many policemen who would eventually become involved in the case. On Sunday afternoon he went to the rest area, examined the bloody jacket, shirt, and sledgehammer, had them photographed by another trooper, and took them back to the Foxboro barracks, where he logged them into the contraband journal. On Monday morning, at precisely the time Douglas reached Washington, Landry turned the materials over to a police chemist for analysis. Working on the assumption that he might be able to connect the property to someone who'd disappeared, he spent the remainder of Monday checking police teletypes about recently reported missing persons.

Landry didn't learn anything useful from the teletyped reports, but the following day, Tuesday, March 8, a fellow police officer mentioned that he'd heard a story about a missing girl on a television news program the previous night. He didn't recall what channel. Landry contacted all the local channels, to no avail; but late in the afternoon, one of the channels called back and said yes, they'd aired a brief report about a missing girl the evening before. She was from Malden.

A few minutes later, Landry was on the phone to the Malden Police Department. Sure enough, a Clarence J. Rogers had reported that his live-in girlfriend, Robin Benedict, had been missing since Sunday, March 6. The police sergeant over in Malden said that according to information he'd gathered, Rogers might be a pimp and Benedict might be a prostitute. He also said that apparently the girl had last been known to be going to Sharon to pay a call on a William H. J. Douglas, Ph.D.

What had she been wearing when she disappeared? Landry asked the Malden police sergeant. Slacks, a beige shirt, and a beige jacket, he was told.

Landry reported back to his supervisors that he had an ID on the person who had, in all likelihood, owned the beige jacket. On an official level, the Benedict case had begun.

It had already begun on an unofficial level. By Tuesday the eighth, J.R. had hired a private detective agency to help him search for Robin. He felt certain that whatever had happened to her, William Douglas had had something to do with it. And even as Trooper Landry was talking with the Malden police sergeant, Jack Da Rosa and Jim Smith of Boston's Central Secret Service Bureau were en route to Washington, D.C., to scout out Douglas.

Da Rosa and Smith knew where he was staying because he'd left his phone number for Savi Bisram. They checked into his hotel, the Hotel Washington on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by 10:30
P.M.
, they had persuaded Douglas to let them come to his room. They were investigating the case of a missing girl, they told him, and they understood he knew her.

Sure, he knew her, he said. She was a prostitute who worked out of Good Time Charlie's. Sure, their information was right; sure, she'd been to see him at his home on Saturday night. But she'd left at about midnight to go to a party. Had the detectives looked into the whereabouts of some contact of hers in Charlestown, a guy named Joe?

The private eyes listened impassively. Then one of them, noticing that Douglas was wearing a large, three-by-three-inch bandage on his forehead, asked him what was wrong. He said he'd walked smack into a kitchen cabinet at home just before he'd come down to Washington.

When was that? Da Rosa and Smith also asked him. He'd taken a train down from Massachusetts on Monday, March 7, he said.

Why hadn't he flown down? they wanted to know. Because, he explained, he'd had a lot of paperwork to do in connection with the meeting—an important meeting of the Veterans' Administration Merit Board—and taking the train had given him a perfect opportunity to get the work done.

Soon the two detectives left, but they paid Douglas a second visit about an hour later, and this time, when the subject of his head wound came up, he told them that it had happened as the result of a mugging. Someone had tried to steal his briefcase and in the scuffle had hit him over the head with it. The incident had occurred in Washington's train station, he said.

Contradictory and nervous, he struck Da Rosa and Smith as suspicious, and they asked him if they could take a look around. He must have been afraid that to refuse would somehow be incriminating, for he said okay. Then, trembling, he stood by warily while they searched the room cursorily. In his suitcase, tucked between his clothes, were the license plates he had removed from Robin's Toyota. But although Da Rosa and Smith opened the suitcase, they didn't discover the plates, and the next day they headed back to Boston, leaving him to finish his conference.

Back in New England, the private eyes were informed by the Malden police that the police over in Foxboro had in their possession a jacket that might have belonged to Robin. And on Monday, March 14, they and their client, J.R., as well as Robin Benedict's father, were taken to the State Police Chemical Lab in Boston to view the jacket and see if they could identify it.

Trooper Landry and the chemist who had analyzed the bloodstains produced the beige corduroy jacket and showed it to J.R. and Benedict separately. J.R. was first. The chemist raised the jacket. Suddenly J.R. became visibly upset and began to shout “No, no! That's hers! No! No!”

His reaction, so extreme and so volatile, made Landry suspicious, and he grabbed the jacket and took it closer, placing it right under J.R.'s nose and demanding that he smell it. The jacket, everyone who handled it had observed, still bore a strong odor of perfume despite the dried blood on it. Did J.R. recognize the smell? Landry asked. But J.R., violently upset now, took one sniff at the jacket and started to run out of the room. Landry got him back; then, somewhat subdued, J.R. stated that without a doubt, the perfume was the kind his girlfriend, Robin Benedict, used to wear. He was certain of it because he'd bought her the scent.

A few minutes later, Landry showed the jacket to John Benedict, who said it was definitely his daughter's. She'd worn it on a visit home only the week before, and he remembered it distinctly because there'd been some talk about it. His other daughter, Rhonda, had coveted it, and she'd tried it on, admired the fit, and half grudgingly given it back, joking that Robin could keep it because Rhonda didn't like the style of the collar. As John Benedict described the conversation, tears welled up in his eyes.

Right after the incident in the lab, Landry believed that J.R., who had seemed to be overreacting, had killed Robin. But during the week that followed he changed his mind. He spent that week learning everything he could about Robin Benedict and her movements just prior to her disappearance. He spoke to Savi Bisram and some of Robin's other hooker friends. He visited her trick pads, talked to the operators at her answering service, interviewed the real estate man she'd been with before going to Douglas's house, and tracked down the mysterious Joe from Charlestown. And he heard about William Douglas's obsession with Robin, about the Tufts investigation, and about how the professor had haunted the young prostitute at the Saugus health club and quarreled violently with her in front of Officer Testa of the Sharon police. At last, on March 19, almost two weeks after the murder, Landry called Douglas down to the Foxboro police barracks.

It was an unsettling interview. Douglas stuck to his story that although he'd known Robin, he knew nothing about her disappearance. Yet, throughout the interview, there was something peculiar about the scholar's demeanor, something untrustworthy about his responses. Landry couldn't quite put his finger on it. But in any event the shirt that had been found in the barrel was a man's size 17-34, a size that would fit the thick-necked Douglas. And the shirt, as well as the hammer and Robin's jacket, had been located a mere five miles from Douglas's house—the last place Robin was known to have been going. Given these facts, Landry reported to his supervisors after his interview with Douglas that there was probable cause to believe that Robin Benedict had not just disappeared, but had been murdered, and probable cause to believe that William Douglas might have been responsible.

That night the case was turned over to a judge, and several state troopers, under the supervision of Lieutenant Sharkey, obtained a search warrant and proceeded to search Douglas's house.

Lieutenant Sharkey was christened James Henry Horace Michael Patrick Francis Sharkey. “I was named for all my six uncles, and only one of them left me any money,” he likes to joke. A tough-minded detective who has helped to solve many of Norfolk County's most baffling crimes, he is rugged-looking, with the face of a character actor who even when young could never play romantic leads.

Sharkey was to get to know William Douglas better, perhaps, than anyone else had ever known the secretive professor. He interviewed him repeatedly, read his private files and correspondence, examined his stockpile of pornography, tailed after him to all manner of assignations, and eventually heard his intimate confession. Knowing Douglas so well gave Sharkey a kind of attachment to the man. He would always maintain—even though he would be mocked for it by those of his colleagues who saw Douglas as a malevolent, unnatural genius—that the professor was likable. He would always maintain that the man had been no match for Robin and that, in fact, few men were a match for today's new breed of prostitutes. Even himself. “When I got into this case, I thought I knew everything,” he told me. “But it's a new world out there in the Combat Zone. I've seen girls there who frighten even me.” And he would always maintain that he felt sorry for the professor.

He certainly felt sorry for the Douglas family. By the night of the search, the emotional chaos that had overtaken the lives of the Douglases had assumed a virtually palpable existence in the house. The rooms were filthy, utterly disordered. There were stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. There was decaying food on every counter. In the laundry, the washer had long before overflowed, and the floor was covered with greasy, soapy water. In the master bedroom, there were piles and piles of newspapers, with cockroaches crawling in them. Sharkey told me that it was as if Nancy had gone on strike and Douglas into a remote world of his own. “What got me,” he said, “what would always be some sort of a symbol for me, was that downstairs in the family room there was a bulletin board, and on it a note written in a child's handwriting. It said, ‘Won't somebody please clean up this house?'”

But if Sharkey felt sorry for the family, it didn't affect the quality of his detective work. He was full of wiles. “Douglas was arrogant that night,” he told me, explaining what had happened. “He was looking down his nose at me. So when I read him his rights and wrote down his statements, I just played along with him. I took down his words, but every once in a while I'd stop and ask him how you spelled something, letting him think I was as stupid as he thought I was. It worked like a charm. I think he felt he could say anything he liked around me, and I just wouldn't get it.”

With Nancy he was equally cunning but softer. Indeed, his cunning lay in his gentleness with her. She had been extremely shaken when the police arrived—at about 12:30
A.M.
—and Sharkey had consoled her and even held her hand. When she asked him if she could take the children out to a neighbor's, he said what a good idea that was and that she could if she wanted to. She didn't, but by then he had won her confidence, and, as a result, he was shortly to be able to obtain from her a bit of evidence that was ultimately to prove extremely damning to Douglas. The evidence was a bit of thread.

Sharkey and his men had brought with them the blue shirt that had been found in the trash barrel. It had been mended under the armpits, and Sharkey commented on the mending and showed it to Nancy. Had she sewn it? he asked, and if so, would she mind showing him the thread she'd used? Nancy said she thought it looked like her sewing, and she went to the bureau drawer and got out a spool of thread. Sharkey contemplated it thoughtfully, then asked her if she had any other spools of thread with which she might have mended the shirt. Nancy, utterly cooperative with the kindly detective, went to another room and brought back another spool.

Eventually the spools would be submitted to the FBI lab in Washington, and a fibers expert there would discover that in color, composition, thickness—indeed, in every respect—the second spool matched the thread that had been used to sew Douglas's shirt.

The search turned up other extremely incriminating pieces of evidence. One was a box of plastic garbage bags that appeared to match, in size, color, and brand, the bag that had been taken out of the rest area trash barrel. Another was one of Robin's pocketbooks, which a trooper found in Douglas's bedroom closet. It was stuffed with prophylactics. Robin's address book was also found, as was the beeper to her Panasonic answering machine, her Armstrong flute, and her pink panties.

But the most damaging piece of evidence was one that the police chemist, Ronald Kaufman, stumbled across. Searching the living room closet, he came upon a man's blue windbreaker. He did a presumptive test for blood on the windbreaker and found that there was a positive reaction in the right-hand pocket.

The jacket was confiscated. Later, it too would be sent to a lab for analysis, and it would turn out that in the right-hand pocket there was, not only a tiny smear of blood, but a fingernail-size piece of human brain tissue. The jacket was, of course, the one that Douglas had taken out of his closet right after killing Robin, in which he'd tried to conceal the hammer. Apparently he'd forgotten all about that effort.