As in San Francisco after Eversall/Sifakis, I had listened. But in Sharon, one-tenth the size and one-fiftieth as sophisticated, the echoes had resounded ten thousand times as loud. The Kurzinskis were known, liked, envied and admired by the entire town; I had destroyed a part of the town along with them. My presence was the town, in much the manner that a powerful lover becomes every piece of space surrounding the one who loves him. I was everything Sharon, Pennsylvania, saw; for my post-killing year there, I was the regulator of its heartbeat.
I had been Billy Rohrsfield, library clerk and Co-ed Connection iron pumper by day, Shroud Shifter by night. For 365 straight dusks I performed ritual identity changes: slacks, shirt and jacket into the hamper; black jump suit on, hawk nose formed and applied out of putty. Cheekbones and eyebrows shaded, so that my whole face came to points. A police-band radio and my party-line hookup for listening to THEM talk about ME; wondering when they would drop their “mystery clue” pretense and speak my night name to the world. Getting hard when old biddies worshipped me with fearful voices; climaxing when men spoke of me in rage. It was paradise until something began going ssss/tick, ssss/tick, ssss/tick in my ears, and I started thinking about voiding the security patrols I had inspired, slipping through their neighborly nets to waste an entire family. Underneath ssss/tick ssss/tick, ssss/tick, I knew it was foolhardy, so discreetly I left the town, with regret and some gratitude for the return of plain old ticking.
I picked up a young man hitching just south of White Plains, and he told me I could caddy the season at any one of a half-dozen Westchester country clubs — all I had to do was look hearty and presentable. He also mentioned a rental bureau in Yonkers that matched up summer passers-through with the apartments of Sarah Lawrence College students on vacation. I took the kid’s advice on both counts, and by the end of the day Billy Rohrsfield was ensconsed in a small bachelor pad on the Yonkers edge of Bronxville and had caddied nine holes at Siwanoy Country Club.
And that night Billy became Shroud Shifter for the first time in New York.
With no local celebrity, no radio band or primitive party line, there was nothing to do but listen to the tick tick tick tick ticks grow louder and wonder who and when and where. So I did — Billy at the golf course days, my special self of hard facial edges at night. The ticking continued, and on a hot day in mid-July I stopped the clock right in the heart of midtown Manhattan, strangling a drunk passed out in a pew at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Post and Daily News headlines turned the ticking to a whimper, and I went Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter into the heat of August and another excursion into the Big Apple. This time the alarm went BLAAAAAAAR when I was strolling through Central Park and a bum asked me for change. Surrounded by other strollers, I motioned him behind a mound of bushes and slit his throat. The artist’s sketch of me that adorned page two of the Post the following day was a poor likeness, and as Shroud Shifter that night, I put my mind to the task of creating a prolonged reign of terror.
From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary:
8/17/83
I’m back again, coming up for air after three straight months of paper prowling, helping Jim Schwartzwalder conduct field interviews in Minneapolis, conferences with the shrinks and what amount to conferences with Carol — she’s gotten that formal and severe. I come home late, exhausted and edgy from too much coffee, and she’s studying. I put on reruns of the Honeymooners or Sergeant Bilko — nice frivolous antidotes to coroners’ reports filled with disemboweling and severed penises — and she tells me that the frantic nature of ’50’s comedies created a whole generation of kids prone to quick laughs, quick gratification and violence. Since her diatribes sound preprogrammed, I figure she’s picked them up from one of her professors. It is getting undeniably bad with her; we will have to talk seriously soon. I hope the cause of all Carol’s anger at me is clinical — menopause sounds like a logical, methodical way to wrap it all up. I miss the old her.
Speaking of wrapping up, Jim Schwartzwalder’s vehicle cross-checks got him the name of a suspect he makes for thirteen child abduction/murders in the Midwest. Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus of Minneapolis, a traveling salesman for a stationery-supply company. I went with Jim to Minneapolis. We found out from Anzerhaus’s boss that he was on the road and probably hitting Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that night. We called the S.A.C. in Sioux Falls, gave him the name of the motel Anzerhaus usually stays at and told him to wait for him there. Then we checked out Anzerhaus’s apartment. We found the scalps of six children in an ice cooler. Jim completely blew it and trashed the place, throwing furniture, breaking bottles. I finally got him calmed down, but then the Sioux Falls S.A.C. called and said that Anzerhaus never showed up. I figured that his boss tipped him off, so I left Jim at a bar to chill out and confronted the guy. He admitted it, and then I completely blew it — busting the asshole for Impeding the Progress of a Federal Investigation and Aiding and Abetting the Escape of an Interstate Fugitive. I would have hit him with an Accessory charge if I thought I could make it stick.
When I got back to the bar, Jim was fried. He told me that if Anzerhaus killed another child before we got him, he was going to kill his boss. I’m 40 % sure he means it. Jim’s sticking in Minneapolis to supervise the investigation, and Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus, my professional advice is for you to commit suicide, because you will be caught, and between Jim Schwartzwalder and the moralistic organized-crime boys who rule the federal pens, you will be thrown into deep, deep shit.
Enough on that — Anzerhaus is no pro fugitive, he won’t last another week. The big news — the big jump — is that my “Shifter” and “Shroud Shifter” queries just got red-hot. Last June 5, a brother and sister were killed in their Sharon, Pa., apartment. He died from a neck wound caused by an ax blow, she was strangled. The killer wrote “Shroud Shifter Prevails” on the wall in the male victim’s blood, and the Sharon cops kept it under wraps to eliminate phony confessors. No confessors (611 came forth) admitted writing the words, and the cops did a super job of stonewalling the clue. I’ve got the entire Sharon P.D. case file — 1,100 pages, 784 F.I. cards alone, and am going over it with the shrinks and Jack Mulhearn. No F.I. names match to any of the names from the case files of the previous disappearance/killings we make Shifter for, and I’ve called the Aspen cops and browbeat them for info on the guy who called in the initial Shroud Shifter notation. No one there remembers the guy, it’s not in any of the Aspen files, and they’ve had a big turnover in personnel since ’76. Heavily extrapolating on that, Doc Sefdman thinks the guy who called in the information is Shifter, that he’s got genius-level intelligence and a huge ego, and is probably bisexual with a slight preference for men. Doc got ahold of some old issues of “Cougarman Comics” — the comic book that featured Shroud Shifter. He says it’s sick shit — sadomasochistic and necrophiliac in tone. Beyond all that, he thinks Shifter is between 32 and 37, and that he comes from a “Car Culture Milieu” — the Southwest or California. Doc leans toward Southern California because “Cougarman Comics” was most heavily distributed there, and because he makes Shifter as coming from an environment that worships good looks and physical fitness. Whoever chopped the male victim in Sharon was tremendously strong, and the victim and his sister were bodybuilders, so his theory does jibe with our existing hard evidence.