“What?”
Again the wink — a velvet glove that smothered all possible queries. “Enough said. Listen, Martin. This is really my room. I keep it for long shifts and snow-in’s. You can stay if you want, but there’s only the one bed.”
The look in Ross’s eyes told me he was talking comradeship and style, not standard meanings. I took off my shoes and lay down, and Ross unhooked his gun belt and wrapped it around the bedpost only inches from my head. He lay down beside me and flicked off the wall light and seemed to fall into sleep concurrent with the abrupt darkness. Exhaustion hit me, and as the most incredible day of my life flickered out, I got frightened and stroked the grips of the .38, drawing comfort from knowing I could murder the murderer lying next to me.
Thus reassured, I slept.
Sunlight and the sound of heavy machinery awakened me dreamless hours later. I immediately felt for Ross, found the other half of the bed empty and jumped up. I was moving toward the sink and a cold-water bracer when he walked through the connecting door, a small revolver in his hand.
I grabbed at the sink edge, thinking of betrayal, and Ross gave me his rakish teenager grin and flipped the gun so that it was butt out. Handing it to me, he said, “Smith and Wesson .38 Detective’s Special. Safe, serviceable weapon, very cold. You didn’t think I’d let you walk out of here unarmed, did you? Ross the Boss, what a guy.”
I flipped the cylinder open, saw that the gun was loaded and stuck it in my back pocket. I couldn’t say “Thank you” — it felt acquiescent — so I asked, “Are the roads clear?”
Ross said, “Being plowed now. You should be able to truck by noon.”
I stood there, thinking of the taped-together snapshots and my magnum, not knowing what to say or do. Seeming to read my mind, Ross said, “Your stuff is safe with me. I’ll never rat you off, but I may need you someday, and the evidence is insurance.”
I was reverberating with the implications of “need you” when Ross leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. I leaned into it and tasted wax on his mustache and bitter coffee on his tongue, and when he broke contact and about-faced through the door, I was flushed and hungry for more. I did not yet know that the kiss would push me and haunt me and hurt me and drive me for the next two and a half years of my life.
V
Lightning Scatters
From the Milwaukee Tribune, February 19, 1979:
It is now over six weeks since the “Wisconsin Whipsaw,” a rapist/slayer who terrorized the Janesville-Beloit area during December and January, claimed his last victim.
On the snowy morning of January 4, the butchered body of Claire Kozol, 17, of Huyserville, Wisconsin, was discovered in a cabbage field near the Illinois border. She had been raped, beaten to death and dismembered — in a manner identical to Gretchen Weymouth, 16, whose body was discovered a few miles away on December 16, and Mary Coontz, 18, also of Huyserville, who was found in a duck blind on the outskirts of Beloit on Christmas Day. All three young women were attractive, slender brunettes, and forensic psychiatrists attached to Wisconsin State Police Headquarters in Madison were convinced that a highly motivated and exceptionally vicious psychopathic killer was operating in the Southern Wisconsin area. Their psychological profile (based on previous ease histories and physical evidence from the three killings) concluded that the murderer would continue to kill the same type of victim in the same manner, until captured or killed himself.
A task force of twenty Wisconsin State Police detectives were assigned to the investigation full-time, and they were assisted by officers from the Janesville and Beloit police departments. Elaborate decoy traps to snare the killer were set up, in anticipation of another murder attempt in the near future. The net was tightening, and police officials were certain the blood-crazed murderer would step into it soon.
But he didn’t, and there have been no further killings matching the Wisconsin Whipsaw’s M.O. since Miss Kozol’s body was found on January 4. Wisconsin State Police Sergeant Ross Anderson, who supervised the decoy deployment, has a theory as to what happened.
“It’s a theory based on the Psych. 101 course I took in college and circumstantial evidence,” the trooper, 29, told reporters. “But instinctively I credit it.
“On January 5, the day after Miss Kozol’s body was found, I was supervising snowplowing on I-5 south of Huyserville when I spotted the rear of a car, partially covered by snow, off the roadside. I dug through the snow and saw that the car was a ’79 Cadillac with Illinois plates. There was no driver trapped inside, and I checked the glove compartment and found ID belonging to a man named Saul Malvin, age 51, of Lake Forest. When I saw O+ blood on a donor card, my skin prickled. We typed the rape-killer from his semen — and he was O+.
“I radioed the Lake Forest P.D., and they told me that Malvin’s wife had reported him missing that morning — he had left the previous morning to visit friends in Lake Geneva. I took a vest I found in the backseat, drove to Huyserville for a K-9 team, drove back to the area and initiated a search. About eight hours later, the dogs and I hit paydirt.
“Wolves had chewn away most of the man’s upper torso, but you could still tell what had happened. Malvin was dead, about ten yards off the roadside. There was a .357 Magnum in his hand. His wallet was intact, filled with cash. I ran back to my cruiser and radioed for an ambulance, then I started thinking.”
Trooper Anderson’s ultimate theory — that the late Saul Malvin was the Wisconsin Whipsaw, and that he committed suicide in a moment of guilt over his crimes, has created a furor among his W.S.P. colleagues, and opinions are divided on the subject of the former insurance executive’s culpability. Lieutenant W. S. Havermeyer, the commander of the Huyserville Substation, summed up the pros and cons at a press conference last week. “As of now, we’re assuming that if the Whipsaw isn’t Mr. Malvin, he’s in jail or the loony bin, or he’s moved on. The shrink boys in Madison say that sometimes these repeating psychos have a moment of clarity and kill themselves, especially right after an especially brutal job, so that fits circumstantially, and Malvin did have O positive blood. We’ve checked out his whereabouts at the times of the three killings. His car was found just a few miles from where the Kozol girl’s body was discovered, and on the dates of the two previous murders, December 16 and Christmas, he was allegedly working at home alone and waiting at home for his wife to return from celebrating the holiday with her invalid sister.
“So, circumstantially, Malvin could have been the perpetrator, although he does not ‘play’ as one. He had no criminal record, was happily married with grown children, was successful and well-liked by friends and family. That is in his favor.
“But he did commit suicide with a gun that to this day cannot be traced, and relatives and friends have told us that he had no logical reason to take his own life. Unfortunately, wolves had attacked Malvin’s body just before Sergeant Anderson discovered it, and if there was any physical evidence on his person linking him to Claire Kozol, the animals probably destroyed it. All in all, I’m grateful there have been no more killings.”
Sergeant Anderson, believed by many of his colleagues to have “cracked” the case, will be moving on to different duties — carrying extradition warrants to midwestern and eastern cities and returning with felons wanted by the Wisconsin State authorities. He is grateful for the change of pace, and told reporters: “The Whipsaw case took a lot out of me. It’s going to be nice to get a change of scenery, to ply my trade in new places.”