When the waiters came around with fresh coffee, Walter urged the Vidocqeans to try to imagine the pleasure the killer experienced when he drained his victims of all their blood in water. “The water heightens the pleasure. Try squeezing a sponge under water at home. When you feel the water gently tickling the hairs on your arms, it’s sensual. That’s the kind of pleasure the Butcher experienced, an intense sexual pleasure.”
Fleisher was beaming. The meeting was a success. He bragged to the Times reporter, “Sherlock Holmes was a great detective. But he was all imagination. We’re the real thing.” The Vidocq Society, he said, was “like a college of detectives. You couldn’t get a more astute group of detectives.” But the question was, would the society be a college that discussed murders as an academic exercise, or would the detectives come down from their ivory tower and try to solve crimes? The Times reporter asked Fleisher, “When are you going to actually solve a murder?”
Fleisher said the Butcher of Cleveland was probably past solving. He was confident after just a handful of meetings that “we will solve ninety percent of these cases that come before us. Everyone in the room knows who did it. But it’s a lot more complicated bringing a cold killer to justice.”
“We haven’t solved one yet,” Fleisher added. “But we’re getting close.”
When he saw his words conveyed around the world to millions of readers in the pages of The New York Times, Fleisher only wished it were true.
“Clearly this is not another show at the local mystery dinner theater,” the Times concluded, “nor a meeting of Sherlock Holmes buffs.”
“He did a grand job of saying who we aren’t,” Walter quipped. “But who the hell are we?”
CHAPTER 26. IMPLORING GOD
As the lights dimmed in the Texas ballroom, the faces of the dead appeared, larger than life yet so young and small, to soft music accompanied by a staccato of gasps and sobs from the audience. Each child’s face brought another cry from a banquet table, another candle sizzling in the dark, until the great hall glimmered like a concert-a hushed and otherworldly concert where parents implored fate or God for an encore.
Retired Philadelphia police captain Frank Friel sat in the ballroom of the San Antonio Hilton, chain-smoking and haunted by his thoughts. In his suit pocket was his keynote speech; in his hands was the national convention’s Book of the Dead. At his table were the conventioneers, their faces distorted with grief or anger or flooded with tears, like rain washing over stone. It was Thursday evening, August 11, 1991, and the fourth annual convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) was a gathering unlike any Friel had ever seen.
As he stood to speak to the hall filled with mothers and fathers, uncles and grandparents, of murdered children and young adults, Friel prayed for guidance. The enormity of the suffering in the room weighed on him; he was struggling to keep down a bottomless grief, to stare into his own soul.
In thirty years on the Philadelphia police force, Friel had thought he knew all there was to know about murder. He’d investigated thousands of them as a cop and homicide captain. He’d been codirector of the Philadelphia Police-FBI Organized Crime Task Force that virtually destroyed the Philadelphia Mafia in the 1980s. He’d fearlessly stood up to the murderous don, Nicodemo Scarfo, who identified Friel as his “chief nemesis.” He’d personally investigated the bombing assassination of Philadelphia godfather Philip “Chicken Man” Testa on the Ides of March 1981, when Testa was blown through his front door as he put the key in the lock at 2117 Porter Street in South Philadelphia. In the nation’s fourth-largest city, Friel was the best of the best. The former city police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo once said, “No detective in the history of the Philadelphia Police Department was better than Frank Friel.”
Retired from the Philly PD for two years, he’d taken a job as the public safety director of Bensalem, Bucks County, and worked as a consultant to the FBI and Major League Baseball on organized crime. He toured the country assessing the professional standards of police departments for the National Commission on Accreditation. He taught criminology at Temple, St. Joseph ’s, and LaSalle universities. But the POMC was something new. The group had 100,000 members, with chapters in most states, and provided a full range of services to suffering families. The convention seemed surreal to him. In seminars and hallways, at meals and over drinks, they learned from experts and one another how to endure a murder in the family: inattentive, inept, or corrupt cops and prosecutors; an exploitive press; the court system with its noble constitutional safeguards for the rights of their sons’ or daughters’ killers and none for them or their son or daughter; friends, neighbors, and church folk who shunned them; the sidelong glances that said, This doesn’t happen to good girls and boys; the psychologists who had no true explanation, and thus no true word of solace, for evil.
Friel thought he knew the awful secret of murder in America. The awful secret was that since 1960, when he joined the police department at age eighteen, more than 500,000 Americans had been murdered-approximately ten times the combat deaths in Vietnam, nearly as many American deaths as the Civil War and World War II combined. The combat in Americans’ private lives was the nation’s penultimate war, and the troops were sadly undermanned.
Big city police were overwhelmed by a flood of new murder cases each week. With no time to do the job properly, they focused on easy cases and let difficult ones slide. The typical PD was a tragically inefficient bureaucracy that half the time chained the detective to a desk, pushing needless paper, Friel said. “Disgraceful turf battles for individual glory” consumed cops at all levels and prevented city, state, and federal agents from working together. The result was that “the streets are less safe for our citizens than they should be, and crimes-often very serious crimes-that could be solved are not.” The result was that as many as 30 percent of murders nationwide went unsolved. Put another way, more than 100,000 Americans in a generation had gotten away with murder.
Friel knew all that. Then he saw “The Murder Wall” in the main lobby of the hotel. It was a simple display, with homemade posters and photographs, telling the stories of 120 murder victims. His eyes scanned the faces of the dead: not drug dealers or gang members, or the front-page victims of the Los Angeles Night Stalker or Chicago ’s Killer Clown. A twenty-three-year-old Chicago medical student. A thirty-four-year-old Michigan lawyer. Two young Minnesota girls who went shopping for school and never came home. America ’s slaughtered boys and girls next door.
Friel saw parents quietly approach the wall, heads bowed. They left notes and flowers as if at a war memorial. They seemed broken, invisible men and women whom he’d heard say in the hallways and seminars, “Don’t let the killer take another victim.” It hit Friel then that nobody had put into numbers the larger tragedy of American murder, the uncounted hundreds of thousands of people struggling to find a healing they knew would never come, a rough closure. How they hated that word, “closure,” he noted. They knew it was not possible.
JUST ONE PERSON IS MISSING, James Charles Kaloger’s parents wrote at the wall. BUT OUR WHOLE WORLD SEEMS SO EMPTY!
Friel scarcely remembered his keynote address that night. Returning to Philadelphia, he knew he had seen through a fissure in the surface of American crime to an underground, a place of routine tragedy and suffering that was unimaginable and therefore unimagined.