The Skeleton Crew (26 page)

“Okay. You were tipped off.”

I didn't bother to set her straight. “So what next?”

“How much do you know?” she demanded in turn. She sounded angry. “Are you going to write about it?” Then the classic police-to-media gripe: “You could compromise the investigation.”

I couldn't promise anything, I said vaguely. I had wanted to go over the history of the case, I told her, talk to Chief Jaran and former acting chief Warren Tobias, who'd headed the investigation as staff sergeant after Jimmy Meads retired. I knew about the DNA test that had been done in 2001. I'd heard tales about the office of the Boston medical examiner—
tales of incompetence, lost evidence, botched autopsies. In any case, I asked Lobur, why would news of the latest exhumation compromise the investigation? And why should I keep quiet about it? After all—what with the hazmat suits and the gravediggers and the patrol cars and the police tape—anyone who'd happened by the cemetery where the Lady of the Dunes was interred could have figured out what was going on.

“We were doing this on the QT,” she sighed. (Were we in a Raymond Chandler novel?) “That's why I wasn't responding. I'd hoped to have something to tell you.” So I was supposed to wait patiently and obediently until they decided to return my calls, or until they procured a new DNA profile, maybe even an ID, for the most notorious cold case in Massachusetts history? Now I was getting mad. Was it even legal to run a law-abiding citizen's plates without probable cause? And I was dubious about her proposed deal. “I'm not going to be the first person to find out what you learn,” I shot back.

No, the detective admitted. But she hoped to have some news in a few weeks.

Six months later, I still hadn't heard from her.

Bobby ushered me to the station's communications center, an open room lined with workstations, three TV screens mounted on the ceiling, a table holding soda bottles and condiments, and a few potted plants. Bobby's desktop was crowded with monitors. Amid boxy hard drives on the floor, a foot pedal controlled a microphone through which Bobby spoke to the officers on patrol.

On an ancient Dell monitor, Bobby pointed out the locations of units 777, 778, and 784 among the twenty or so patrol cars at that moment cruising Quincy's streets. Bobby showed me his nifty devices: a direct phone line to every police department in the state, a teletype through which the deaf could type Bobby a message and he could choose an automated response: “Do not hang up” or “Help is on the way.”

I asked him if, in his web sleuthing days, he would have considered adopting the Lady of the Dunes.

He would have, he said quickly, if it had ever crossed his radar. (He
wasn't sure why it hadn't.) It was local, and it was perplexing that she hadn't been identified after all these years. “It would be a challenge, you know.”

Bobby pulled up on one of his screens the home page of the Doe Network, where the Lady of the Dunes was case file 119UFMA.

If Bobby chose to adopt the case, he said that he'd study it, memorize every detail. Height, weight, hair color. “And this, see this? She's got very expensive ‘New York–style' dental work. That gives you a little hint. Maybe she's from the New York area.”

He pointed to a photo on the screen. It was the image I remembered from
The Boston Globe
. I was struck all over again by the knowing look in her eyes, the neatly swept-back hair, the Mona Lisa smile.

“See this NCIC number?” Bobby said, pronouncing it “nick.” He grabbed a pen and scratched out U-615805149 on a scrap of paper, muttering each digit under his breath. Bobby led me to one of the other workstations and plopped onto a rolling desk chair. Here was where his special access gave him an advantage over the civilian community: Unlike your average web sleuth, he could enter a query into the national crime database. He typed the Lady of the Dunes's case number and hit a key. The teletype sputtered to life, jittering out an incomprehensible string of uppercase letters and numbers onto blank sheets from a perforated stack.

Running one finger over the text, he translated: “It says it's an unidentified person, entered by the Provincetown police department.” He pointed to a row of
R
's interspersed with two
N
's, like something a child playing on a keyboard would produce. “These signify body parts. See, this is strange. They got an
N
next to hands, meaning they were not recovered. Everything else is recovered.

“Estimated year of birth—they're narrowing it down to 1939 to 1949. Estimated date of death—they're listing that as July 12, 1974, a couple of weeks before the body was found. Obviously, they didn't find the hands, so they didn't have fingerprints.” He peered at the sheet. “You know, not a lot of people got red hair; that could cut it down.”

He rattled off the rest: eye color could not be determined; eyes and ears may have been removed; extensive gold dental work.

Back online on the Doe Network site, Bobby clicked through to the “missing” side and chose “female” and “Massachusetts” from a drop-
down menu. Around a dozen names appeared. Next to each was the date each individual was last seen. I scanned the dates over Bobby's shoulder. There was one woman from 1974. Even though that was the year we were searching for, I was taken aback that we had come across another woman who had been missing for as long as the Lady of the Dunes had been dead. I thought about her family, waiting and wondering, maybe even hoping. Or perhaps whoever had reported her missing had given up or was no longer alive. For each person listed—Bobby moved on to another screen full of names—there was a story, almost guaranteed to be a sad one. It was a lot of sorrow and regret for one computer screen to contain.

“Right here, this girl here, she went missing in August,” Bobby was saying. The body in Provincetown was found in July. Not a possible match. Bobby clicked through to the next page. More names, more stories we didn't know and didn't have time to investigate.

Bobby hunted and pecked the letters of “gold dental” into the page's search box. The Lady of the Dunes's gold and porcelain crowns, root canals, and gum treatments would have cost ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of tens of thousands today. Even the Tufts University forensic dentist who analyzed her teeth soon after she was found declared her rather fastidious, commenting that most people wouldn't go to that much trouble about their teeth.

Bobby predicted our search terms would generate all manner of gold-related clues, not only those related to teeth, and he was right: one missing woman was wearing a gold chain necklace when she disappeared. Another woman had a gold key chain holding fifteen keys.

Sitting side by side, our heads almost touching, we scanned the pages for “gold” and “dental,” which showed up in bold within the list of cases. We eliminated name after name. I thought I was getting faster but Bobby had me beat, whipping through page after page like a speed demon. We read for a while in silence, Bobby clicking the right-pointing arrow as he reached the bottom of each page.

Persistence, patience, and attention to detail might seem like basic requirements for web sleuthing, but I had never fully absorbed the extent to which that was true. Bobby had more patience than I did. “We got this New York clue,” he said after a time, referring to the note in the case file
about her dental work being “New York–style.” He suggested that if we struck out with women reported missing from Massachusetts, we could start looking at those from New York.

I had known that web sleuths faced a Herculean task. But at that moment, seeing all those faces struck me in a visceral way. There were so many missing people, so many unidentified bodies. And so few of us trying to connect the dots.

If all this wasn't daunting enough, we were on page eleven of twenty. My eyes started to glaze over. I couldn't tell which details might be pertinent; I no longer trusted my judgment, or whether I would recognize a possible match if I saw one. I remembered how much I used to identify with Agatha Christie's clueless Hastings instead of with Poirot. I took a deep breath. Bobby noticed my flagging attention. “You just got to keep looking,” he urged. “It's a process of elimination. It's tedious, you know.”

I couldn't say I was sorry when Bobby's shift was over. We took a grimy elevator back down to the station's cinder-block lobby, walked past a bulletproof-glass-enclosed front desk and bulletin boards plastered with mug shots of Class 3 sex offenders. The world outside was just coming to life. People filtered out onto the sidewalks holding Dunkin' Donuts cups, dressed for work. It was the start of a sunny late-spring day.

In my car, I tailed Bobby's Chevy Blazer with the two Red Sox bumper stickers to the clapboard rooming house where he lived nearby. Satellite dishes sprouted from the side of the triple-decker like toadstools on a tree trunk. Bobby inserted a key and wrapped both hands around the doorknob, wrestling with the sticky lock until it gave way. The place wasn't the Taj Mahal, Bobby had warned me.

I followed him inside, tugging the door closed behind me, and started climbing. It was so dark, I felt my way up the narrow, green-carpeted staircase. We emerged on a landing that could have used a fresh coat of paint, and there was a musty odor, but the communal kitchen was orderly, with utilitarian white-painted cabinets and bare counters. We continued down a hallway past identical plywood doors; Bobby opened one. The room on the other side held a double bed, a small desk and computer, a saxophone and clarinet propped on stands under a window, and an electric keyboard. He pointed to faded photos in dime-store frames on the wall over the desk.
“My favorite singer, Billie Holiday,” Bobby said. “Stan Getz. My parents. Me, from when I was a boxer.”

The other boarders didn't mind his practicing, he said, as long as he didn't wake the cabdriver who worked nights and weekends. Debbie, who joined us, said Bobby drew crowds when he played jazz on the porch of the clapboard house where she kept a room next door. I pictured him standing out there, coaxing moody notes from his sax for an impromptu concert, the audience leaning on the parked cars in the asphalt lot. Debbie said she was a country and western fan herself.

Back in the police station, I'd had to concede that Bobby and I were not about to achieve fame and fortune by solving the mystery of the Lady of the Dunes. I was ready to leave the case in the hands of law enforcement; in fact, in May 2012, Provincetown detective Lobur had told me she and Chief Jaran were working on a promising lead. I had a good idea what she was referring to.

A few months earlier, I was driving my teenage daughter, a figure skater, to the local rink for predawn ice time. I reached to turn down the radio that she had set to brain-jarring rap when I caught a theatrically urgent voice saying something about New England's most infamous cold case. News at eleven.

What were the odds that the Lady of the Dunes, which had produced no news in decades, would suddenly resurface?

At home that night, perched on the edge of the couch, I turned on the TV news and sat through coverage of fires, accidents, weather. Finally, the male voice-over breathed, “. . . a murder so gruesome . . . the woman has never been identified.” “Nameless grave” and “thirty-eight years later” scrolled down the screen in designed-to-look-creepy letters. Something, again, about a footprint in the sand. Finally, her image appeared on the screen, the auburn ponytail and soulful eyes of the latest digital reconstruction. The reporter said notorious South Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger had been seen in Provincetown in the 1970s. With him was a woman who looked like the Lady of the Dunes.

Now, in his rooming house, sitting at his computer, Bobby leaned toward me confidentially. “Did you read”—he glanced around, his throaty voice low—“that she”—Bobby meant the Lady of the Dunes—“could be involved with Whitey Bulger? They say he was seen with a girl that looked just like her down in P-town. There could be something to that.”

Bulger, the eighty-two-year-old former Boston mob boss and FBI informant, was arrested in California in 2011 after sixteen years on the lam. In spring 2012, as Bobby and I talked, Bulger was awaiting trial, charged with participating in nineteen murders. He was in jail, but
his fabled history and reputation
as one of the nation's most wanted fugitives was very much intact. Bulger, though usually associated with South Boston, and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, had lived in Quincy for a time in the 1980s, sharing a condo around three miles from Bobby's rooming house.

And now Bulger's name had surfaced in connection with the Lady of the Dunes. It was, investigators thought, a killing eerily similar to those Bulger and his associates were accused of carrying out.

“Did you hear that?” Bobby asked Debbie, four gold hoops rimming the edge of her right ear. “She could have been another one of his victims.”

“Who's to say?” She shrugged. “If he was involved, a witness might not want to come forward. They may think they'll end up the same way. It's never all come out, never ever.” (“Nevah evah,” in Debbie's Boston accent.)

Bobby said even in retirement he searched NCIC reports for any potential matches for that unidentified skeleton found decades ago in the Quincy woods—the case that had launched his web sleuthing career. That victim had been killed with a blow to the head and buried in a shallow grave. For all we knew, that John Doe could have been one of Bulger's victims, too, Bobby said. “Bulger still has his connections,” Debbie insisted. “His people are still his people.”

Even though Bulger had been named in connection with the Lady of the Dunes murder on the most public forum imaginable—the TV news—the topic clearly made Bobby nervous. Was he picturing some Bulger cohort coming after him—and after me? A law-abiding citizen worrying
about becoming a possible mob target might strike some as melodramatic. Nevertheless, we were in Boston, the setting for
The Departed
,
The Fighter
,
Mystic River
. I wondered if Bobby's concerns were legit. I contacted Thomas J. Foley, a retired Massachusetts state police colonel who had investigated and helped convict a half dozen of Boston's most notorious thugs in the course of his decades-long career.