From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 1982:
From the Philadelphia Post, June 19, 1982:
MOTIVE FOR KURZINSKI SLAYINGS BAFFLES POLICE; FALSE CONFESSORS POURING IN
From the Sharon News-Register, July 14, 1982:
VIGILANTE GROUPS FARMING TO HUNT FOR KURZINSKI KILLER
From the Sharon News-Register, August 1, 1982:
KURZINSKI MURDERS TRIGGER PANIC BACKLASH — WIFE SHOOTS HUSBAND BY MISTAKE
From the Sharon News-Register, December 8, 1982:
STILL NO CLUES IN KURZINSKI MURDERS
From the Sharon News-Register, January 6, 1983:
KURZINSKI CASE CONTINUES TO BAFFLE LOCAL POLICE
From the Sharon News-Register, March 11, 1983:
From the Sharon News-Register, May 14, 1983:
From the Sharon News-Register, May 20, 1983:
From the diary of Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, F.B.I. Serial Killer Task Force:
5/22/83
True to form, I’m running about a year behind in starting this diary. If Carol weren’t out studying those ornate Renaissance guys with college kids less than half her age, she’d be looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing. She’d note the statement that begins the diary, and she’d say, “As in all things in your personal life, dear.” True to form, I wouldn’t know if it was a dig or an expression of love, because Carol is a tad smarter than I am, and a big tad better than me at everything except chasing felony offenders and earning money. And if she’d ever get off her (still curvaceous at 44) ass and take the real estate brokers’ board, she’d beat me at the latter. And if Mark and Susan decided to quit school and become felons, forget it.
Backtracking, about ten years ago, right after Hoover died, every agent in captivity started writing his memoirs. Some actually got published. All were self-serving, full of fantasy and hearsay anecdotes about the Big Man. I was envious of the guys who got published, but enraged that they portrayed themselves as such sensitive liberals, when in fact most of them were to the right of your typical banana republic dictator shouting anti-commie slogans and pushing cocaine on the side. I looked at them ($10,000-$20,000 publishers’ advances, royalties, movie options and glory for doing something I always figured I’d be pretty good at), and I looked at me — living above my means as a sop to my family for always moving them around the country with my assignments, telling Carol “Don’t get a job, baby, I’ll teach another night-school class,” and I thought, “Shit, I’ve been taking out bank robbers for years; I’ll write a book, and I won’t even mention J. Edgar.”
But the truth is — bank robbery is a bore, unless you take personal satisfaction from removing bank robbers from the streets. I do, and that’s the rub. Either the bastards get caught right off the bat by municipal P.D.’s and we take over the legal end after they plead, or, predictable creatures with well-established criminal patterns that they are, they go where we know they will, and we find them. Personally satisfying, occasionally exciting, but most of the time my job was to read reports in my office and figure out where the dummies would go if they were suddenly rich. So scratch one best-seller about a hotshot Fed robbery investigator. Joe Blow over in Fraud Division — you deal with a higher class of criminal — you write the book.
I thought that working the Task Force would make this diary (book later?) easy. It hasn’t, and the Force is a year old already. I thought that Carol would be supportive and help me with editing, but she’s engrossed in her studies, and every time I mention possible chains of missing children, she freezes up and we don’t make love for a week. When I try to get intellectual and relate some of the monsters that come out of Serial Sally to van Gogh (poor bastard) or Hieronymous Bosch, she freezes me out with gooey landscapes from her texts. The hidden truth: she regrets never having a career, and envies my dedication to mine. She’s also pushed Susan and Mark in the direct ion of the arts, which should keep me on Broke Street and teaching classes until they’re 30 and Ph.D.’s. And that’s fine — although I suspect Mark would be happier as a carpenter or contractor and Susan happier as a wife and art-dabbler.
But I’m rambling from the point, which is that the Task Force is the big assignment of my life, the most satisfying and troubling, and it’s still hard to write about it. To be honest, it’s Carol’s freeze that’s allowed me to get this far. I come home late, still pumped up, still hot to work, and the snowy art woman (unfair, darling, but allow me temporary license) piles on a few more snowdrifts. The Task Force has got me thinking family, so I’ll use Susan to switch from one subject to the other.
Susie called long-distance (requesting money) last night. We bat the breeze, and I ask her if she’s dating anyone, what her general philosophy regarding marriage is. She says, “Well, Dad, I believe in serial monogamy, and I imagine I’ll keep practicing it.”
I hit the fucking ceiling and yelled at Susie, something I rarely do. It was the word “serial” and its connotations, of course. I wasn’t too coherent while Susie and I were arguing, and we said good-bye a few minutes later, but this morning I put it all in place. It was her absence of romantic illusion. She’s 22, she sleeps with her boyfriends, it doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s just that she knows that sooner or later it will end; she doesn’t have that youthful feeling of “forever” that you lose soon enough anyway. I would rather wish her the way of Gretchen, the Force’s exec, secretary, than the way of that awful word. Gretch is 31, two kids from a bum marriage that she thought would last forever, has affairs with the wrong guys, who ultimately split because the kids scare the shit out of them. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s a great mother, she’s got some gay men friends who’re funnier than Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor put together, and she’s still got hope. We hug every once in a while, and if I weren’t such a loyal dog, I’d go where Gretch seems to wish the hugs would go.
With “serial” you just go on to the next one. Lover or murder victim, you just go. This morning, getting up the guts to start this diary, I wanted to see my name in print, so I looked at a copy of Law Enforcement Journal from last year. There I was, Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, using my Bureau-learned verbal style, all “perpetrator,” “apprehend” and “circumstantial.” I also used “staggering” a lot, and with that I’ll jump to the real purpose of this diary:
It’s more than staggering. I’m a veteran criminal investigator, and for the sake of reality I wish there were adjectives to top “staggering,” “mind-boggling,” “incredible,” etc. Sixteen months ago I would have told you that the only thing deserving of the above hype was my wife’s hauteur at a Bureau cocktail party. Today I would beg Carol’s pardon and say, “Sorry, baby, there are human beings out there, college-educated, with executive-level jobs, who beat people to death, steal their cufflinks as souvenirs, then go home and round up the kids, take them to Little League practice and foot the bill for the whole team at Haagen Dazs on the way back to the wife and tender sex.” If Carol balked, I would point out one of the three serial killers our Task Force has thus far taken out in its year of existence: Federal case file 086-83 — Whalen, William Edmund, aka the “Chappaqua Chopper.”