Witness stated he wanted it on the record that he did not meet with victim in order to extort money, that payment was entirely her idea. Witness stated: ‘I never solicited a bribe.’ Witness stated that of course he was happy to accept money since ‘I live pretty close to the edge these days,’ but that money was not his primary motivation. Witness stated: ‘All I wanted to do was help the lady who'd been through a hell of a lot and didn't deserve to lose her kids.’ Witness stated that when he accepted cash at second meeting, he told victim: ‘I owe you plenty for this, and I intend to work my ass off going back over ground we covered when we tried to find out what happened to your little girl. Who knows? Maybe something will turn up after all these years.’ Witness stated that when he said this, tears formed in victim's eyes. Witness stated: ‘She took my hand and squeezed it and said, “I thank you with all my heart.”’
Witness stated it was always his intention to honor pledge to victim and he still intends to do so. Witness stated: ‘Soon as the custody case was finished I was going back to work on the Fulraine infant abduction. That's what she paid me for. That was our deal. So, see, I didn't take her money to screw Mr. Fulraine. I took it to do an additional job for her. Meantime, I gave her a warning and offered to do my best to see she wasn't screwed by her ex along the way.’ Witness stated he still intends to carry out assignment on his own time, ‘because she paid me to do it and when something terrible happens like this, no one should be allowed to get away with it.’
Amazing! I put the papers down. The webs of interlocking agendas is growing dense and I've only just started reading through the documents.
Time to take a break. I step out into the corridor, refresh myself at the water cooler. The Sheriff's Department is quiet this time of night. Down the hall the pebbled glass in Mace's office door is still lit up.
Returning to the conference room, I decide to examine some of the physical evidence. I pull on a pair of latex gloves, open the first big carton… and am horrified! It contains the bedding from room 201 – blanket, sheets, pillow slips – discolored, bullet-rent, encrusted with rust-colored stains, which I take for residue of the victims' spilled blood and guts, even possibly of their sex.
I reel back from the table. One thing to imagine the scene, quite another to be confronted by its effluvia.
I close the first carton, open the second. This one contains the victims' clothing and personal possessions recovered from the crime scene: a woman's white tennis shirt, long khaki shorts, underwear, and sandals; a pair of men's jeans and blue denim work shirt, underwear, socks and sneakers; assorted men's and women's rings, watches, wallets, and keys. Just seeing this stuff makes me feel strange. Suddenly the victims are all too close. In my imagination, I realize, I've endowed them with mythic stature. Now, looking at these humble garments, they seem smaller and ever so vulnerable.
I open a third box, find it filled with numerous glassine envelopes identified by neat handwritten labels. Some contain fingerprints lifted from room 201: exterior and interior doorknobs, phone receiver and dial, water glasses, faucets, bureau drawer handles, even the handle of the toilet. Others contain samples of hairs, fibers, various sweepings, scrapings and swabs, four red, ejected empty shotgun shells, and, most distressing, numerous shotgun pellets recovered from the room. There is a treasure trove of forensic evidence here – DNA samples, possible identifiers such as shoe and weapon material – all carefully preserved for presentation in a court of law, still available for analysis by forensic technologies that at the time of the murders did not exist.
I examine the crime scene photographs. Like everything else in the case file, I find them meticulously keyed in Mace's hand to numbers inscribed on the lower right corners: (1) VICTIMS VIEWED
FROM FOOT OF BED; (2) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM NORTH WALL; (3) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM BATHROOM DOORWAY… the list goes on.
The pictures are brutal. It's the harsh colors that makes them so, and their total lack of artistry. It's clear no effort was expended on lighting or composition. These are straight-on, flash-lit police photographs that rob the victims of anything heroic. I barely recognize the neat and undistinguished motel room where I executed by moody drawings. The room, depicted in these photographs, appears smaller, more confining, and totally befouled. I sense the photographer's distaste, his wish to quickly do his job and get out. In one shot I note a reflection in the mirror above the bureau of young, eager Mace Bartel holding a handkerchief to his nose, watching with disgust.
Enough! I prefer my own drawings, my imagined romantic renderings of the scene. When I drew the slain lovers, I wrapped them in gloom; in these pictures, their bodies are etched by a pitiless strobe.
I turn back to the file folders, start reading through eyewitness statements. There isn't much of substance.
Motel office clerk Johnny Powell thought the shots were backfire noises. By the time he turned to look, all he saw was the back of a man in a black raincoat running toward the street.
A Mr. Jeff Slade, vendor of kewpie dolls and other amusement park prizes and giveaways, was returning to his room on foot after a taxing negotiation with the managers at Tremont Park, when he saw a man rush from the Flamingo Court into the adjoining parking lot. He didn't think much about it until a few seconds later when, entering the courtyard, he saw a number of people wearing dazed expressions standing on the motel balconies. Perhaps, Mr. Slade surmised, it was on account of his military training that he turned just as a dark car pulled rapidly out of the lot. He identified the car as a late-model Olds and caught a quick glance of the driver. The product of this sighting accompanies the interview report, a crude Identi-Kit portrait that resembles a classic square-faced cartoon thug. At the bottom, the interviewing officer notes that he doubts the reliability of Slade's account as two other persons independently identified the suspect as a four-year-old Chevrolet.
A Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cranston from Buffalo reported a fleeing black-hatted, black-raincoated man, as did a Miss Bonnie Lanette, known to local police as a prostitute who worked the grounds of the amusement park and frequently brought her johns to the Flamingo for fun and games.
Two small children were interviewed, a boy and a girl who'd been frolicking in the pool at the time. Neither could offer anything beyond the fact that a man had run down the exterior stairs then out toward the parking area just after the shots.
All four of the ejected shotgun shells had been wiped clean of fingerprints, suggesting a well-thought out professional hit. It was also conjectured that since the shooter had worn a long coat and wide brim hat, he was also probably wearing gloves.
Mr. Andrew Fulraine, through his attorneys, offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. Later this offer was raised to $75,000 and still later to $100,000. Investigators passed on word of this offer, huge for the time, in the hope of prying information from snitches. In fact, according to an advisory from the FBI, only two men in the entire Midwest were suspected of specializing in hitman work, neither of whom had recently been sighted in the Calista area.
A search of public trash barrels, private garbage cans, and construction debris, Dumpsters within a quarter-mile radius of the Flamingo yielded no sign of weapon, hat, coat, or gloves. A thorough but fruitless search was made of trash-collection points within Tremont Park on the theory that the car seen leaving the motel parking lot might not have been an escape vehicle driven by the shooter. Rather, according to this alternative theory, the shooter had left the scene on foot, then merged into the crowds that thronged the amusement park that hot, humid afternoon.