“As it happens, it’s not uncommon for one to have such feelings,” said Walter. “Indeed since the Greeks, it was deemed important to vent them in appropriate places-to the courts, to family, to friends, to one’s god-until we find our way again.” He left knowing there was still work to do.
Joy and Brian Kosisky also had a murder in the family that was ruining their lives. Joy’s brother had been murdered in Greenville, Pennsylvania. In gratitude for his work in helping them understand the case, the couple had sent him the crystal obelisk for Christmas. As Walter turned the glass in the sunlight, there appeared in the crystal the delicate lines of an angel, acid-etched into the interior of the glass.
“An acid angel,” he mused. “I quite like that.”
Now the acid angel, ensconced in a cloud of cigarette smoke, sat in his Chicago hotel room the day after his presentation with Bender. Before him sat a pair of Urbana, Illinois, police officers with their bulky cold-case file. The police from the southern Illinois city had presented one of the most notorious and puzzling cold murder cases in the state’s history to the Vidocq Society the previous spring, March 15, 2001. It was the 1988 murder of the wealthy, popular University of Illinois veterinary student Maria Caleel, a case that had earned Urbana police little but frustration and embarrassment for fourteen years.
After hearing Walter’s luncheon theory on the murder, police sent him the case file. They had driven the 140 miles from Champaign-Urbana to meet him while he was in Chicago and hear his thoughts.
“Gentlemen, now that I’ve read the file,” Walter said with a grim smile, “let me explain the case to you.”
The file for the fourteen-year investigation had grown to more than 1,600 pages. Police had accumulated forty suspects, but never made an arrest. “I’ve read the 1,600 pages on the computer, so I couldn’t make notations,” Walter said. “Nonetheless, I eliminated thirty-nine of the forty suspects. In the course of events, one is the killer, who has flown all these years just below the radar.”
“The killer was obviously someone Maria knew,” he continued. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning on March 6, 1988, Caleel was asleep in her garden apartment in Urbana when someone knocked on the door, or perhaps entered using a key. Her attacker struck in the dark, grabbing her from behind and plunging a six-inch knife upward and deep, precisely nicking her heart, and fled. As Caleel crawled to an apartment across the hall, dying from a single stab wound, a female student called police and asked her, “Who did this to you?”
“I can’t believe it,” Caleel replied. “I just can’t believe it.” Those were her dying words. She never identified her killer.
The murder of the attractive, bright, gifted twenty-one-year-old vet student made headlines across the country. Her friends said that Maria’s family dined with princes, yet they never knew she was wealthy. She had entered Brown University at sixteen, graduated with a biology degree, and was a straight-A student at the highly competitive Illinois vet school. Grounded in her love for animals, she rode her horse Tristan early on the day she died, and later that day tried to save the life of a prematurely born foal.
The police were “absolutely gobsmacked” by the murder, Walter said. It defied logic. There was no break-in, no robbery, no sexual assault. The popular young woman had no enemies who would want to kill her. The FBI was brought in to study the case, to no avail. Maria’s parents, the prominent Chicago physician Dr. Richard Caleel, and former model Annette, hired private eyes, and personally provided most of a $50,000 reward.
As the years passed with no arrests, the Caleels did everything in their power to keep the case and their daughter’s name alive. They donated a small fortune to create Maria Caleel funds and scholarships across the country-a Maria Caleel polo trophy at the Oak Brook Polo Club; Maria Caleel conferences on violence against women; a Maria Caleel University of Missouri journalism school award; Maria Caleel horse shows, equine research grants, a Maria Caleel prize for the best biology student at Brown. Finally, the Caleels asked their family-friend Lynn Abraham, the renowned Philadelphia district attorney and VSM, for advice. The DA recommended a Vidocq Society investigation.
Walter had sparred at times with Illinois investigators, using lines such as “I fully respect your constitutional right to be wrong, nonetheless…” But now his voice purred as he coolly described the killer as a young man in the vet school and friend of Caleel’s who bore a psychopathological anger toward her for her “relatively innocent college student flirtations.”
The signs of a murderer who killed neatly and efficiently “in a manner of disposing of trash” to correct a perceived wrong were evident at the scene. The killer’s precision with the knife was no accident given his anatomical skill with animals. With a misogynistic hatred, Walter said, “His thought process was thus: I didn’t realize she was a disgusting and despicable whore, but I’m responsible for her, and I’ll clean up the mess. So he killed her.” Walter raised an eyebrow. “With no one else among the forty suspects,” he explained, “can one draw a straight line connecting the crime and pre-crime and post-crime behavior? This guy is the lemons falling into place-the jackpot.”
At first skeptical, police grew enthusiastic and were finally stunned by the analysis emerging from billows of menthol smoke. They talked about zeroing in on the killer, now a prominent man with a wife and children, and unearthing his secret of fourteen years. It would not be easy, but the Vidocq Society would advise each step of the way.
“Are the police happy with our work? ” Fleisher asked later when Walter called to report in.
The thin man began to laugh. “Oh, yes. They’re as happy as a pervert with two dicks.”
As Walter worked the Illinois murder, two of the oldest Vidocqeans reached Ohio on a Sunday night, pulling a big American sedan into a Cincinnati hotel in time for dinner. Bill Kelly and Joe McGillen had left Philadelphia that morning right after mass, with city homicide detective Tom Augustine sharing the wheel during the nine-hour drive. Time had not been kind to the Vidocq senior investigative team. VSM Sam Weinstein, the third retired Philly cop on the Boy in the Box team, was in Israel working with the Israel Defense Forces. The widower McGillen, fearless on a murder, was deathly afraid to fly, thus the 600-mile drive. Kelly had spent the long drive quietly praying for a break in the half-century-old case, fearful he too was running out of time. After another year of beseeching God for help, he’d attended the St. Joseph ’s Seminary annual retreat, the weekend that kept him sane. Steeped in prayer, he asked a sister to help him ask God for a solution to the case, and she replied that she had been asking. Her words haunted him: “Maybe God said no.”
The next morning, the three of them were seated stiffly in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist was a tall man with wavy white hair. None of the cops had ever been in a shrink’s office. Kelly had teased McGillen in the car: “Maybe you want to confess this flying phobia of yours.” Now, after setting some ground rules, the psychiatrist led them into an inner room, and introduced them to a middle-aged woman, sitting at a table, they would call “Mary.” Mary was a tall, handsome woman with unusually broad shoulders and keenly intelligent eyes. She seemed nervous, yet also distant. She demanded her identity be protected; she was an executive at one of the largest drug companies in the world, and “they mustn’t know.” The old cops nodded their promises. She breathed deeply to compose herself. “Oh, God,” she said, “this is so hard.”