The Skeleton Crew Read online

  “It wasn’t evident how she had selected this place to sunbathe. She secreted herself back in there. She was away from where any member of the public could see her. But someone knew she was there, or . . . somebody from one of the shacks stumbled on her . . . Even if there was someone who lived in one of those dune shacks who was offended by that kind of activity and either watched her go in there or stumbled upon her, for them to beat her like that and cut off her hands, why would they do that?

  “If it was a person who was offended by her nude sunbathing or was some kind of sex maniac and they killed her, why would they cut off her hands? It doesn’t make sense.” Hankins’s monologue slowed, as if he’d suddenly become aware that he’d been rambling. He had one last thought. “Whoever killed her knew who she was,” he said, “and killed her for a purpose.”

  * * *

  Several years into the investigation of the Lady of the Dunes murder, all the usual avenues of police and detective work had yielded almost no results, so in a desperate measure, Provincetown selectmen found town money to send Chief Jimmy Meads to New York City to visit a psychic.

  Meads drove six hours, battled Manhattan’s weaving, honking taxis, and made his way to a rather elegant address. A doorman ushered him in and Meads took the elevator to an apartment where he placed on a table a stack of bulging envelopes. Yolana Bard, known as the “queen of psychics,” had for years offered her services to politicians, celebrities, and law enforcement officials. Now she bent over the case materials Meads had placed before her.

  Suddenly she shrieked, “I sense blood!”

  “I had a cup of tea on a saucer in my hand and I damn near spilled it,” Meads recalled.

  Yolana had come across a sealed package containing a bloody object from the site where the Lady of the Dunes had been murdered. She then reported a vision of water dripping, indicating a location on the beach where she said the victim’s hands had been buried. Meads was elated. The hands would provide a key piece of evidence—especially if they could lift a set of prints. He thanked the genial redhead and sped back to Provincetown.

  Yolana’s unfamiliarity with Provincetown—she had never been to Cape Cod—didn’t seem to impede her ability to weigh in on the case. But she could give Meads only vague directions to a place that he took to be the west end of Commercial Street. This street overflowed in the summer with tourists strolling in and out of waterfront galleries and funky shops, ice cream cones in hand. There was the occasional sighting of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, celebrated artists, and flamboyantly dressed drag queens working the nightclubs. At home, piecing together the tidbits that Yolana had divulged, Meads went to the phone book. He decided, finally, that the place the psychic had alluded to must be the old Ace of Spades.

  The Ace of Spades was one of P-town’s first lesbian bars, remembered by a patron as small, dark, and cozy, with wooden barrels as bar stools, redolent of stale liquor. During the 1970s, the place had morphed into another gay bar, the Pied Piper, that attracted visitors from as far as Montreal and Kansas City. It was a weathered, gray building on the water’s edge. In those days, drainage from the bar sinks trickled directly through rough wooden floorboards onto the beach below. Dripping water, sand, a location in town—all seemed perfectly aligned with Yolana’s vision. But when Meads got there, it turned out that a basement had been added to the structure two months earlier. What was once accessible space was now a solid block of cement.

  * * *

  On the phone, Jim Hankins and I fell silent for a time. The next time he spoke, his tone had changed.

  “What I did discover that day, the police didn’t pursue,” Hankins went on, more animated, as though recalling something he hadn’t thought about in years.

  While the chief and others waited for an ambulance to collect the body from the lonely, windswept spot, Hankins walked up the beach alone, away from where she had been found. Perhaps he watched the waves crashing in that magical evening light that makes everything look so pure and cleanly defined, trying to clear his head of the shocking sight of the woman’s mutilated body. Within a short distance, he spotted something odd.

  He saw what looked like large words and pictures drawn in the sand. Beaches by day’s end are tableaux of children’s abandoned sand construction projects, but this didn’t look to him like the kind of thing kids would do.

  He wishes now he had paid more attention, trusted his instincts, gone home and fetched his camera. But he didn’t, because despite his many responsibilities, he knew investigating a murder was not one of them. He deferred to the pros.

  But today, Hankins is convinced someone had been very close to where the body was found shortly before the girl and dog had stumbled upon it, because the wind would have erased the strange markings in a matter of hours if not minutes. Had he spotted a message from the killer, scouting out the scene as killers sometimes did? He wonders about that odd, fleeting sight all these years later.

  Something in Hankins’s voice was familiar to me. He sounded like others who, in the midst of relating the details of a cold case, suddenly went distant, perplexed, helpless, almost angry. To those with a personal connection to a case—or those who developed a connection by becoming immersed in its details online—the intractability of the facts could be infuriating.

  As I listened to Hankins speculate about murder weapons, motives, and mysterious sand writings, I found myself getting sucked into the alluring notion that I could play a role in solving the case by mining disparate clues from participants’ long-dormant memories. It was as if the facts were a jigsaw puzzle that many before me had put together in different ways. If the right person had all the pieces everyone else had struggled with for years, perhaps he or she could assemble them in a new way so that the end result was clearer, if still incomplete. Hankins had stumbled upon a clue—the sand writings—no one had ever considered before. If the puzzle had included this piece from the beginning, would it have come together differently?

  Clearly Hankins and others had been replaying the facts in their minds for years. Todd Matthews told me he wished he could abort the Tent Girl loop the way you’d change the radio station when an overplayed song came on. Despite confronting dead end after dead end, Meads, Hankins, Matthews, and dozens of others couldn’t stop thinking about “their” victims. By the late 1990s, the Internet was beginning to serve as a centralized place where the cold-case-obsessed could input all known clues so that others might catch something the original players missed or couldn’t have known.

  In 1999, a Canadian man used emerging web resources to do exactly that for a victim he knew only as Cali.

  3

  IT’S THE ETHERNET, MY DEAR WATSON

  Amateur detectives are a mainstay of popular culture. Literary ones have been around since Edgar Allan Poe’s impoverished medical student Le Chevalier Auguste Dupin deduced that an orangutan was the culprit in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Eccentric, brilliant, cleverer than the police, motivated by the intellectual challenge, Dupin became the model for every literary and pop culture sleuth that followed: Poirot, Jane Marple, Perry Mason, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes.

  In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes observes that Watson has “a most clumsy and careless servant girl.” An amazed Watson asks Holmes how he knows this. “It is simplicity itself . . . My eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey.”

  Holmes never let Watson forget that he considered himself strictly an amateur. “I claim no credit,” he says in The Sign of Four. “My name figures in no newspaper. The work it
self, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward.”

  With the help of newsgroups, online databases, and message boards, a new breed of amateur detective evolved, modeled on the famed detectives of fiction but with one big difference: the real-life amateurs were dealing with real-life crimes, real-life bodies, and real-life tragedies. And not all sought only personal satisfaction as their reward.

  * * *

  Every amateur sleuth toiling in the realm of Jane and John Does has a pet case. For Canadian photographer Troy More, it was Cali, also known as Caledonia Jane Doe, a teenaged girl shot execution-style in an upstate New York cornfield in 1979.

  When I set out to write this book, I tried to identify the origins of the first site to list details of unidentified remains, but found it was like trying to name the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper or first explorer to reach the North Pole. The answer depended on whom you asked.

  When I asked Todd Matthews about the early days of the Doe Network, he pointed me to an archived corner of the Web where I found a treasure trove—every post since the inception of a cold cases newsgroup, accessible only through a little-used back door. Google doesn’t get you there.

  That’s how I learned that in 1999, More used Yahoo!—then a relatively new domain offering free hosting and other services—to create a newsgroup dedicated to the missing, the murdered, and the unidentified. He called it ColdCases, fashioned a fingerprint-and-handcuffs graphic, and flung an invitation into cyberspace: “Want to discuss unsolved cases? Subscribe to our list.”

  A handful of web denizens made their way to the newsgroup. Reading the moderator’s messages, I got a sense of the man who first summoned the web sleuths to Yahoo! Yet, as elsewhere on the Web, the newsgroup was a veil and More’s identity was indistinct: I saw only what he chose to reveal, sketchy details that emerged piecemeal in random posts meant for an audience that, as far as he knew at the time, did not yet exist.

  More described himself as a jaded news photographer who had seen “a few too many bodies.” He likened photographers to snipers, locking their lenses on the faces of victims’ family members, hoping to capture a moment of agony. In his view, the police, the media, and nonprofits were all useless when it came to missing persons: law enforcement bungled cases, the media ignored “forgotten” victims, and nonprofit organizations fought over donation dollars with the same cutthroat mentality as corporate moguls.

  On ColdCases, he was adamant about including only cases that had fallen off the mainstream radar. He dismissed a prospective member who made the mistake of expressing interest in the murder of fashion mogul Gianni Versace: “We don’t normally deal with celebrity cases here as I’d like to think that people who aren’t rich and don’t wind up on Entertainment Tonight also deserve justice,” he wrote; he preferred to champion victims who weren’t well-known but who had died “just as violently as any celebrity.” Two years before launching ColdCases, More had created a site he called E-clipse Network’s Unsolved Case Files—“in search of the lost, the hidden, and the forgotten.”

  Around the same time, in 1998, Todd, inspired by Tent Girl, compiled details on unidentified remains and missing people on a site he called The Lost and the Found. Independent of both More and Matthews, a Michigan woman, Jennifer Marra—describing herself as a former journalist and using the screen names “Jenni” and “Stormy”—launched yet another site, Stormcritters.com, to document American and Canadian disappearances and unidentified victims prior to 1989.

  * * *

  For Troy More, Caledonia Jane Doe—whose reconstruction shows an attractive, perhaps sassy and tomboyish girl with a pert nose and cleft chin—became a personal challenge. An extremely frustrating one, judging from his posts.

  The official report stated:

  Victim was found in a field near Route 20 by a passing motorist, on November 9th, 1979. Murder weapon a .38 caliber handgun which was recovered at the scene. No information available suggests a sexual assault took place. Clothing worn was corduroy pants, plaid shirt, blue knee socks, and red windbraker [sic] jacket. Victim was 5'3" tall and weighed 120 pounds. She had brown, wavy hair that had been frosted several months prior, a rather deep tan, and tanlines indicating that she had worn a bikini frequently.

  One of the most mournful clues in Cali’s case was a key chain dangling from a belt loop on the girl’s tan corduroy pants. One half was a tiny key; the other a silver heart with a key-shaped cutout inscribed, “He who holds the key can open my heart.” Web sleuths typically pored over details like this. Hercule Poirot would approve. Agatha Christie’s famed character did not scour crime scenes with a magnifying glass (although some web sleuths would if they could). Instead, the brain’s “little gray cells,” Poirot claimed, are all one needs to solve any crime. Sit in an armchair and think, he advised the admiring Hastings. The puzzle pieces will fall into place.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening in Cali’s case. As I read back over months of posts, I saw that More surmised that Cali had known her attacker. It was unlikely, to his mind, that she could have been brought to this remote place near the Canadian border unless she was traveling with her assailant, especially given that there was no evidence she was sexually assaulted or restrained.

  The murder was not premeditated, or if it was, it wasn’t intended to happen where it did, he reasoned. The Finger Lakes region of New York contained many remote haunts that would seem more logical for a planned homicide than out in an open field along a moderately busy road. Shot in the back before the fatal gunshot pierced her right temple, Cali may have been fleeing from her attacker. The weapon, a .38 revolver, was left next to her in the cornfield, where a passing motorist found her shortly after daylight.

  The victim was most likely not a runaway, More believed. She was simply too well-groomed. Her clothing, hygiene, jewelry, and physical condition all suggested that she had been well cared for. Her tan meant she might have lived in the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, or California. A summer tan would have faded by November.

  More checked 1979 business directories for tanning salons, then a relatively new phenomenon. Even if one had been operating in upstate New York and the girl had happened to visit it, he suspected she would have opted for a full-body exposure rather than to create bikini tan lines.

  A thorough search for the manufacturer of Cali’s clothing turned up no such company in the United States at that time, and although More’s research into missing-person files in Canada, Europe, and Australia also led nowhere, he considered the possibility that she was Canadian. November ninth was part of the annual Remembrance Day holiday weekend in Canada, and she was found only an hour from the Canada border, in an area frequented by tourists.

  An event ten thousand miles from where she died may have sealed her fate as an unknown, More suggested. While Cali lay dead in the field, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Iran, holding fifty-two hostages in a standoff that lasted 444 days. By the time media coverage of the hostage crisis had died down, the news of Caledonia Jane Doe’s death had been buried. More was determined to find a way to resurrect it.

  * * *

  In early 2001, Jennifer “Stormy” Marra’s site Stormcritters.com evolved into the Doe Network, and around that time she simultaneously developed a new, similar site, the Missing Persons Cold Case Network, or MPCCN.

  MPCCN collected an impressive four thousand listings for missing and unidentified individuals from North America. During its relatively brief existence, a user named Carol Ann Cielecki would help solve one of its most perplexing cases. Meanwhile, the knowledge that Carol had been seeking in the first place would elude her for another four years.

  In early 2003, Marra’s Missing Persons Cold Case Network was still a few months away from being hacked into oblivion. In a small Pennsylvania town, Carol scrolled through the network’s database, looking for a mention of an unidentified body that might be that o
f her hunky, daredevil ex-­husband.

  I visited Carol in her compact two-story house in Allentown, the post–steel-industry blue-collar town that Billy Joel had made famous. Carol was ready for me, kneeling on her living room rug surrounded by photo albums and loose-leaf notebooks packed with articles and flyers documenting a decade of web sleuthing—and, in Carol’s case, more than twenty-five years of loss and pain. In jeans and a sweater, straight dark hair flipped over one shoulder, silver-gray shadow highlighting baby-blue eyes, she looked like she couldn’t possibly have married Todd Martin Smith more than a quarter century ago. When she pulled out the wedding photos, it made more sense. I saw that she and Todd were very young back then, just kids who, fittingly, went to Disney World on their honeymoon.

  When Carol first started searching for Todd online, she hadn’t seen him since the day in May 1989 that he stopped by the car dealership where she worked to pick up their two-year-old daughter. Later that day—without dropping so much as a hint about leaving to Carol; to his girlfriend, who was taking care of the toddler for him; or to his parents—the twenty-five-year-old motocross racer, sports car enthusiast, and skilled golfer sold one of his beloved motorcycles, abandoned his car on a city street with the motorcycle trailer still attached, and vanished.

  Even after fourteen years, Carol didn’t believe Todd was dead—if he was, she was certain someone would have found his body and notified her and his family—but she lived with a constant, gnawing doubt. She peeked out her windows at night as though he might be lurking in the bushes and wondered if he was keeping tabs on her and their daughter. Once, briefly, she was sure she had spotted him in a crowd photo, a pea-sized face in Parade magazine.