The Stranger Beside Me (41 page)

Debbie and Nancy stood trembling in the middle of their bedroom, heard uie sound of cars pulling up in front. It had been only three |or four minutes since they had called for help. When they looked out their front door, they were astounded to see-not one squad car, but a dozen!

Debbie and Nancy stood in their doorway and pointed to Cheryl's door, told the first officers-Wilton Dozier, Jerry Payne, Mitch Miller, Willis Solomon-Cheryl's name. The

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patrolmen banged on Cheryl Thomas's door, calling her name. There was no answer. Dozier sent Miller and Solomon to the rear of the house to spot anyone who might be attempting to exit at the back. Dozier found Cheryl's door would not open. Solomon shouted from behind the duplex that a screen was off a window to the kitchen, and that that window could be opened. Dozier attempted to crawl into Cheryl Thomas's apartment that way, but, at that moment, Nancy remembered that a spare key to Cheryl's apartment was usually hidden just above the screen door to the porch. No one knew it was there other than the three girls who lived at Dunwoody Street.

Dozier inserted the key, and the door finally gave. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light inside the duplex, Payne and Dozier could see the girl lying diagonally across the bed in the middle room, could see blood on the bed and the floor.

Next door, Nancy and Debbie heard a shout, "My God! She's still alive!" and they started to cry; they knew that something awful had happened to Cheryl. The next shout instructed Officer Solomon to call the paramedics, and then other officers came to the sobbing girls' duplex and told them gently to go inside and shut their door. Dozier and Payne attempted to help the girl on the bed; Cheryl was semiconscious, whimpering, unresponsive to anything the policemen said to her. Her face was turning purple with bruises; it was swollen, and she seemed to have suffered severe head wounds. She lay on the bed, twisting with pain and groaning. Cheryl wore only panties; her breasts were exposed; the sweater she'd worn when she went to bed had been ripped off.

Paramedics Charles Norvell and Garry Matthews, who had just cleared the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital after transporting Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner to the Emergency Room, got the call to return to the Florida State Campus, and they arrived within minutes to treat this latest victim. Cheryl Thomas was carried out of her apartment and rushed to the hospital. Like the others, she had been bludgeoned about the head and was critically injured.

It seemed almost too incredible to believe, but it looked as though the Chi Omega assailant, his blood lust unsatiated, still in the grip of whatever compulsion drove him, had run from the sorority house to the little duplex on Dunwoody,

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ran as if he'd known exactly where he was going, knew who lived inside . .. and there had attacked still another victim.

Dozier secured the scene of this latest attack until detectives arrived, and I.D. technicians: Mary Ann Kirkham from the Leon County Sheriff's Office and Bruce Johnson from the Tallahassee Police Department. Johnson took photographs of the bedroom, the three-quarter bed pushed up against the white siding walls, the tumble of bedding pushed to the floor at the side of the bed, the piece of wood lath-red-stained-at the foot of the bed, the curtain ripped from its rod in the kitchen window, while Deputy Kirkham painstakingly bagged and marked the evidence.

As Kirkham prepared to pick up the bedding from the floor, she found something tangled in the sheets. At first, she thought it was only a pair of nylons. Then she looked again. It was a pair of pantyhose, pantyhose that had been fashioned into a mask with eyeholes cut out, the legs tied together. There were two wavy brown hairs caught up in the mask.

There were no keys in the apartment, and the deadbolt on the kitchen door was still locked, although the chain was off. It was likely that the suspect had entered and left through the kitchen window. As the Chi Omega bedding had been collected-folded carefully and slipped into large plastic bags so that nothing would be lost-Cheryl Thomas's sheets, blankets, and pillowcase were bagged into evidence. Again, all likely surfaces were dusted for latent prints, all rooms vacuumed and the residue picked up, retained for evidence. The piece of lath, possibly eight inches long and less than an inch thick, hardly seemed heavy enough to have inflicted the kind of damage Cheryl Thomas had suffered; it was more the type of stick used to prop windows open, and the red stuff staining one^end was long dried. It would prove to be only paint.

This time, thf investigators found no bark. Whatever weapon the intruder had used, he had apparently taken it with him in his flight. Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, and Cheryl Thomas had been lucky-although they would always bear the physical and emotional scars of that long night. When they would ap-278

pear eighteen months later in a Miami courtroom, when they would face the man accused of injuring them-Ted Bundythey bore few outward signs of the damage done to them. Only Cheryl would walk with a hesitancy, a distinct limp; she, of course, had once dreamed of a career as a dancer. Physicians at Tallahassee Memorial found that Karen Chandler had a concussion, a broken jaw, had lost teeth, suffered facial bone fractures and cuts, and had one finger crushed. Kathy Kleiner's injuries were similar: she had a broken jaw in three places, a whiplash injury to her neck, deep lacerations on her shoulder. All of Kathy's lower teeth were loosened, permanently, and it was necessary to place a pin in her jaw.

Cheryl Thomas's injuries were the worst. Her skull was fractured in five places, causing her permanent hearing loss in her left ear. Her jaw was broken, her left shoulder dislocated. Her eighth cranial nerve was damaged to such an extent that not only was she deafened, but the young dancer would never have normal equilibrium.

Karen and Kathy would be in the hospital for a week; Cheryl would not be released for a month.

Not one of the three girls had any memory at all of being attacked; not one could describe the man who had beaten them with such frenzy. Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman would, of course, never have their day in court, never face the man accused of their murders. For them, there would be a kind of silent testimony: the terrible pictures taken of their bodies, the almost expressionless reading of their autopsy reports.

Dr. Thomas P. Wood, a pathologist on staff at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, performed the post mortem examinations on the dead girls on Sunday, January 15th-one week to the day since Ted Bundy had gotten off the bus at the Trailways Station in Tallahassee. He began the autopsy on Lisa's body at 10:00 A.M. Lisa had been strangled, leaving the characteristic petechial hemorrhages in the strap muscles of her neck, a ligature mark on her throat. She had a bruise on her forehead, scratches on her face. X-rays showed that her right collarbone had been broken by a tremendous blow. It was Wood's opinion that she had been rendered unconscious by the blows to the head. If she was, it was a small blessing.

Her right nipple was attached by only a thread of tissue.

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But this mutilation was not the worst: there was a double bite mark on her left buttock. Her killer had literally Tom at her buttock with his teeth, leaving four distinct rows of marks where those teeth had sunk in.

Lisa had been sexually assaulted-but not in the usual sense; an unyielding object bad been jammed into her body, tearing and bruising the rectal orifice and the vaginal vault, causing hemorrhage in the lining of the womb and other internal organs.

The weapon which had inflicted this damage was later found in the room. It was a Clairol hair mist bottle with a nozzle-top. The bottle was stained with blood, fecal matter, and hair.

The man who attacked Lisa Levy as she had lain asleep had struck her. strangled her, Tom at her like a rabid animal, and then ravished her with the bottle. And then, apparently, he had covered her up and left her lying quietly on her side, the covers pulled up almost tenderly around her shoulders.

The post mortem on Margaret Bowman began at 1:00 P.M. that gray Sunday. The blows dealt to the right side of the girl's head had caused depressed fractures, driving the broken pieces of skull into her brain itself. The area of trauma was "complicated," meaning, to the layman, that there was such extensive splintering of the skull that it was hard to tell where one fracture ended and the next began. The ugly wounds began above the right eye, and continued to behind the right ear, crushing and pulverizing the delicate brain tissue beneath. One fracture was two-and-a-half inches in diameter, and the damage behind the ear was four inches in diameter. Oddly, it would seem at first, there was more damage to the left side of the brain than the right. But there was an explanation: the force dealt to Margaret Bowman's head was so tremendous that her brain had been slammed against the left side of the skull when she was struck with the oak club on the right.

The pantyhose, ligature was cut from Margaret's neck, buried so deep thai it could hardly be seen in the flesh. It was a Hanes "Alive" |Support brand, a fabric of great tensile strength. One leg Tiad been cut off by the killer, but the legs had been knotted above the panty portion-just as the pantyhose mask found in Cheryl Thomas's apartment had been. The delicate gold chain the dead girl had worn was still entangled in the garotte.

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In Dr. Wood's opinion, Margaret, like Lisa, had been unconscious from the head blows when the ligature was tightened around her neck, killing her by strangulation.

Unlike Lisa, Margaret Bowman bore no evidence of a sexual assault, but she had "rope burn" abrasions to her left thigh where her panties had been pulled off with force.

Neither girl had broken nails, no damage at all to their hands that would indicate they had had a chance to fight for their lives. Pathologist Wood had been in practice for sixteen years; he had never seen anything like what he was seeing before him.

Rage, hate, animalistic mutilation. And why?

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Almost anyone living in the vicinity of the Florida State University campus on that terrible weekend would have heard the sirens of the medic units, been aware that police activity was profound, realized that something more than an accident or a usual investigation was the cause. Henry Polumbo and Rusty Gage, two of the musicians who lived in the Oak, returned to their rooms at 4:45 on Sunday, January 15th, even as the paramedics were carrying Cheryl Thomas to the aid unit a few blocks away. They heard the sirens, but they didn't know what had happened. As Polumbo and Gage walked up on the front porch, they saw the man who'd moved into number 12 a week before: Chris Hagen. He was standing at the front door. They spoke to him and he said "Hi." He was staring out in the direction, of the campus; they don't remember what he was wearing exactly, but Gage recalled a windbreaker, a shirt, possibly jeans-dark in color all of it. They don't remember that he seemed nervous or upset. They went upstairs to bed and assumed Hagen had too. By the next morning, as the post mortems began on Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, the radio news broadcasts were full of information about the killer in the Chi Omega House, about the attack on Dunwoody Street. There was a shocked gathering of residents in Polumbo's room; they were horrified, and they were discussing what kind of man could have done such a thing.

As they talked, iChris Hagen walked in. Chris had never come right out arud said what he was doing in Tallahassee. He'd told them th$t he'd been a law student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and they'd assumed he was continuing his studies at Florida State but he hadn't said it in so many words. He had boasted to them that he knew law very well,

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and that he was a lot smarter than any policeman. He'd said, "I can get out of anything because I know my way around." They'd put it down to bull-shitting.

Henry Polumbo remarked that he felt the killer was a lunatic, and was probably lying low as the police investigation accelerated. The others started to agree, but Hagen argued with them. "No . . . this was a professional job; the man has done it before. He's probably long-gone by now."

Maybe he was right; Hagen had said he knew about such things, knew the law, and felt cops were stupid.

While the students at Florida State tentatively began their regular routines, moving-especially the coeds-in a kind of quiet dread, the search for the killer went on. The Leon County Sheriff's Office, the Tallahassee Police Department, the Florida State Police Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement all worked side by side. The streets in and around the campus were staked out constantly by officers sitting quietly in their vehicles, patrolling. After dark, those streets were almost deserted, and all doors were doublelocked, blockaded. If it could happen the way it had in the Chi O House, in the duplex on Dunwoody, could there be safety for any woman in the region?

The evidence, handled through a tight chain-of-evidence so that its progress from the attack sites to the lab at the Florida State Department of Law Enforcement could be traced exactly, was tested, examined, placed under lock and key.

There was a lot of evidence; it would one day take eight hours to log it into the trial, and, yet, there was so little that could help in the probe as far as leading the investigators to the man they sought. Blood samples-not of the killer-but of the victims. Dr. Wood had deeply excised the section of flesh bearing the teeth marks in Lisa's buttock and refrigerated it in normal saline solution to preserve it. He personally saw Sergeant Howard Winkler, head of the Crime Scene Unit of the Tallahassee Police Department, take possession of it. In trial, there would be defense arguments that the tissue sample had been improperly preserved-that it had shrunk. It had been taken from the saline solution and placed in formalin.

Yet Winkler had photographed the bite marks, to scale, with a standard morgue ruler beside them; whatever shrink-