Читать книгу Bone Crusher - Linda Rosencrance - Страница 11

He didn’t want to do it again.

He knew it was wrong, but it wasn’t his fault. It was those damn voices echoing in his head. He tried to fight them, but he was powerless.

“Kill,” they said.

And he obeyed.

Under cover of darkness on that warm September evening in 2004, he cruised the backstreets of Peoria in his Chevy Blazer, looking for his next victim. “Hunting,” he called it. And then he found her. His prey. She was standing in the parking lot of the furniture store, next to Woody’s Bar, like she often did. He pulled up to her and she jumped in. She had no idea it was her night to die.

“You wanna party?” he asked, showing her an eight ball.

“Yeah, but can you take me to get more crack for my friend first?” she asked.

So he drove her to a little house next to a yellow building on the south side of town. He dropped her off, circled the block, and waited for her to come out. Then he took her back to Woody’s so she could deliver the drugs.

When she finished her business, she got back in the car and he drove her to his place on Starr Court. They went inside, where they drank whiskey and smoked crack until they were wasted. Then they got naked and had sex. He wore a condom, like he always did, but it broke.

“You can’t let her go. You can’t let her go. You gotta do it. You gotta do it.”

The voices again.

He put his hand on her throat and squeezed the life out of her. He had to get rid of the body, but he couldn’t do the fire thing because his mom was home and his grandma was coming the next day. He tried to pick her up, but her body was slick from the lotion she had been wearing, and he couldn’t get a grip. So he pulled a bootlace out of one of his work boots and tied it around her neck. Then grabbing onto the lace, he pulled and dragged her off the bed, out of the house, and into the Blazer.

He drove to a place in rural Hopedale that he called “Pitzer’s Cabin,” although he never remembered ever seeing an actual cabin there. He took the interstate until he spotted a cruiser a couple cars ahead of him; then he turned off, onto Route 98, and drove the back roads the rest of the way. He drove down a dirt road and over a levee. He parked the Blazer on top of the levee, then dragged her body a ways and discarded it by a tree.

He got back in his car and drove home, tossing her clothes and shoes out the window on the way. As he was driving, he realized he didn’t have his false teeth. Worried he had lost them when he dumped her body, he turned his car around and headed back to the levee. When he got there, he pulled over and used his headlights to look around. Unable to locate them, he left. When he got home, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had found his teeth.

It was a beautiful early-fall evening. Perfect for camping. Michael McDonough and Casey Kauffman wanted to take advantage of the weather, so they packed up Kauffman’s truck and headed to their favorite spot, near the Mackinaw River on King Road. When they arrived at about 9:15 P.M., they noticed a blue Dodge Neon and a gray Ford Ranger parked near the exact place they had planned to camp. They realized that the owners of the two vehicles were having sex, so Kauffman drove a little farther and parked his truck along the trail.

He and McDonough unpacked the truck and set up camp. They spent forty-five minutes trying to light a fire, but the wood they brought with them didn’t want to burn. So McDonough set out with his flashlight to gather up some small sticks and branches, while Kauffman set up the tent. The other two vehicles had since left the area, so McDonough walked over to where they had been parked to find some wood.

What he found, instead, was the nude body of a black woman lying on her back on the ground in the woods, her head facing toward the right. The woman had what looked like some kind of string or necklace around her neck. He yelled for Kauffman, who called 911 as soon as he saw the corpse.

It was just about half past ten at night when Deputy Sergeant Darryl Stoecker and Deputy Sheriff Dan Nieukirk, of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO), were dispatched to King Road to investigate the discovery of the body of a black woman who had been found naked in the woods. A gravel road, King Road ran north about a half mile from Wildlife Drive, coming to a dead end at the Mackinaw River. Detective Hal Harper and Deputy Dave Wilson were also en route to the scene.

Wilson was the first to arrive. He parked his squad car at the crest of the hill at the end of King Road. When he got out of his car, he saw McDonough and Kauffman standing at the base of the hill where the road split into three sections. As Wilson walked down the hill, he noticed one of the men pointing to a wooded area to the east of the roadway. As he moved closer, Wilson saw the body of a black woman lying on her back on the ground. By then, the other investigators also had arrived.

Wilson walked back to the campers and listened as Kauffman explained how he happened to find the woman’s body. The detectives asked for the license plate numbers of the vehicles that belonged to the man and woman who had been having sex. Then he telephoned them to determine what, if anything, they had seen. The couple told police all they saw before they left were the two campers and a farmer working in a field.

As they continued to investigate, the deputies stopped a red Ford F10 that was leaving one of the farms. The driver said he and his five-year-old son, as well as his buddy, who had been driving a silver Chevrolet Tornado, had been camping in the area on property owned by a local farmer.

Wilson talked to the men, then turned the scene over to task force members, Detective Cy Taylor, Captain Bobby Henderson, and Detective Hal Harper, who had arrived with a crime scene technician to investigate and process the scene.

The woman’s nude body was lying a few feet from a large tree in a grassy area covered with leaves on the right side of the dirt road, just over a steep rise. She was lying on her back with her arms extended up from her body. Her legs were slightly apart and extended, but it didn’t appear her body had been posed. There was a black-and-tan–striped shoelace or bootlace around her neck. Police couldn’t figure out if there were two laces or one lace that had been wrapped around her neck twice. There were leaves on the left side of her head and maggot eggs on her face, genitals, and the other openings on her body.

Police also found empty shopping bags and facial tissues near the woman’s body, which they collected as evidence. About a hundred feet away from her body in the shoulder-length grass next to the road and near a bean field, police found a white tennis shoe with blue striping on it. A short distance away, police discovered the other tennis shoe in a thicket. It appeared that someone had tossed each shoe separately into the brush from the road, because police didn’t find any evidence that anyone had trampled on the scrub in the area. Police also observed a glove that had been tied as some sort of marker on the top of a hand-made barbed-wire fence, most likely by a farmer.

The woman’s body was photographed and sealed, then recovered by employees of a local funeral parlor under the direction of an assistant coroner. Investigators conducted a thorough search of the area, but their observations were limited because it was dark. Detectives finished up a little after two-thirty in the morning. Henderson and Harper went back to the Peoria Police Department (PPD) to try and identify the body. They looked through mug shots and missing persons reports, but they couldn’t figure out who she was.

At just about the same time Harper was on the phone at the Peoria Police Department trying to identify the body, a woman from East St. Louis, Illinois, called the police with information that her sister Benita might have been murdered in Peoria. The woman said someone had telephoned her to give her that information.

The woman said a female called her at home and, trying to disguise her voice, said Benita had been murdered. Then a man, who identified himself as “Detective Mike Williams,” also called Benita’s sister to say Benita had been murdered and that the family should go to Peoria.

The problem was that police hadn’t yet released the information about the body found on King Road. So they were worried that the person or people making the phone calls had “suspect knowledge” about the crime. However, the female caller and the “detective” said the body had been found in Peoria, not in Tazewell County where it was actually found.

So police went to Benita’s home in Peoria to check on her and discovered she was alive and well. She had no idea why someone would think she had been murdered. When her family arrived, they were relieved to find she was safe.

The next day Benita met Harper at the Peoria Police Department. She told him she had been having problems with her friend Sherry, who also lived in Peoria. Benita said Sherry had recently been arrested and charged with smashing out the windows in Benita’s car. Benita said she also believed Sherry had broken into her apartment and was probably the person who had made the phone call saying she was dead. Harper, however, didn’t quite believe Benita’s story. He figured there had to be more to it than what Benita was saying.

The next evening Harper and PPD detective Chris Hauk went to Sherry’s house to talk to her. Sherry told them that she and Benita were fighting because Benita had stolen some jewelry from her. But she was adamant that she hadn’t made any phone calls to Benita’s family in East St. Louis as a prank or for any other reason. And she said she had never smashed the windows in Benita’s car. She said Benita was lying to get her in trouble.

After he got back to the station, Harper called Benita and informed her that Sherry denied making the phone calls or doing anything else to her. He told Benita he believed she was lying to him and that she had actually called her family to tell them she was dead. Angry, Benita said she would “take the rap for all of it, if that’s what the cops wanted,” but she hadn’t done anything.

Later that night, Sherry and a man named Conroy showed up at the station to talk to Harper. Sherry said Conroy had helped Benita make the calls to her family and she wanted police to clear her as a suspect. Conroy told Harper he was sorry he ever let Benita talk him into pulling the prank on her family. And he wanted police to know that no one was killed, and he didn’t know anything about anyone being killed.

Conroy said Benita asked him to help her get back at her family for pranking her. Benita said someone in her family had called her to tell her a friend was dead, and she wanted to turn the tables on them. So with Benita listening in on an extension, Conroy called her sister and told her that Benita had been found dead and they needed to get to Peoria as quickly as possible.

But when Benita’s sister became terrified and panicky, Conroy realized it wasn’t funny anymore and immediately hung up the phone. Conroy decided to come forward to the police because the incident seemed to have sidetracked a real homicide investigation. Conroy told Harper he didn’t care if he was arrested for the stupid stunt he pulled on Benita’s family but he wanted to be cleared as a suspect in the real murder.

Harper called Benita’s sister and told her what had happened was just a practical joke gone horribly wrong. However, the timing of the prank was extremely coincidental, to say the least.

At about five in the morning, Detective Eric Goeken and other members of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office went back to collect evidence from where the body had been found. Goeken and Detective Cy Taylor took the evidence back to the Morton Crime Lab and began the process of trying to identify the victim.

While they were there, crime lab technicians were able to identify the woman by her fingerprints. She was forty-year-old Linda Kay Neal. After learning that Linda had been staying on Cass Street with Chucky Clinton, Goeken and Taylor went to pay him a little visit.

Chucky told police he hadn’t seen Linda since Thursday, September 23, when they were both at home. He wanted to know why the police were so interested in Linda, but he wasn’t at all prepared for their response. When he found out she was dead, he lost it and started crying and pacing around the house.

“Me and her were boyfriend and girlfriend, but I asked her to move out Thursday because she liked crack more than me,” he said. “I thought she went to stay with a friend, Alexander Lee, on George Street.”

Chucky told the police that Linda, whose nickname was “Chocolate,” often “dope-dated,” which meant she traded sex for drugs. When guys picked her up, she’d take them to one of the many hotels in East Peoria, and a lot of the times, she’d be gone all weekend.

“Was she strangulated?” Chucky asked.

“We’re not totally sure,” Goeken said. “We’re still looking into it.”

According to Chucky, Linda used to hang out with a bunch of white guys from a local towing company. Every Thursday, she’d buy drugs and take them to her “boys” at the tow lot. She also hung out at Woody’s Bar and Roger’s Place, bars located near the tow company.

“I tried to convince her not to be dope-dating,” Chucky said. “She told me she was raped by a white guy she didn’t know, who was driving a smaller dark-colored truck. Linda used to wear wigs to make her hair longer when she went out, and the guy took her wig as a souvenir before he let her go.”

Linda saw the guy drive by Chucky’s house as she was getting ready to leave on Thursday, and she screamed for Chucky, who was in the back room. But by the time Chucky got there, the guy was gone. Linda waited in the house for a short time, then left, most likely headed to Woody’s or the tow company.

The next day one of Linda’s regulars, a black guy in his fifties with a twisted face named Doe-Doe, went by Chucky’s house looking for her. When Chucky told him Linda was gone, the guy drove away.

Around ten on Saturday night, Chucky walked to Roger’s Place to get some cigarettes. He saw a white guy who hadn’t been around for a long time sitting at the bar. He was talking to the bartender, who was Roger’s sister-in-law. The guy knew Linda and had been with her before. Chucky asked the guy, whose name he couldn’t remember, if he’d seen Linda, but he said he hadn’t. Chucky told police Roger’s sister-in-law might know the guy’s name.

After talking with Chucky, the detectives went to Roger’s Place to talk to the bartender, who told them she last saw Linda about eleven on Friday night. She said Linda only had one beer, then left by herself.

Linda’s stepbrother, Kevin, told police she had called his house on Saturday, sometime during the second quarter of the Illinois-Purdue football game. When Kevin asked where she was, she told him not to worry about where she was and to let her talk to their dad, R.C. Kevin didn’t think anything of it because Linda had a great relationship with her father.

“The call lasted maybe three to five minutes,” Kevin said. “Even though R.C. talks to her, he forgets the conversation right away because he has Alzheimer’s.”

Kevin suggested police talk to Penny, one of Linda’s friends. Penny said Linda used to call her every day to tell her how things were going, but the last time she heard from her was Wednesday.

“She called me and said, ‘I got a new man,’” Penny said. “She told me she was just around the corner, and that meant somewhere near my house. She said she couldn’t talk long, because she had to fix her new man breakfast.”

Detectives also talked to Linda’s friend Sabrina, who said she remembered that Linda had been raped recently. She said there was a rumor going around that at some point after she had been raped, Linda spotted the guy in his car, and she and some people she was with beat him with a baseball bat.

“That’s really all I know, but I’ll try to get more information for you,” she said.

The police also talked to several of Linda’s other friends, but they really didn’t get any information to help them in their investigation.

Harper also went to talk with Alexander Lee, who said he was a close friend of Linda’s. In fact, he called Linda “his girl.” Lee said Linda had been sexually assaulted by a guy driving a dark red Ford pickup truck, with white wagon wheels. He said he thought her assailant lived on War Memorial Drive in Peoria.

Toward the end of September, Peoria Police Department detectives Sean Meeks and Chris Hauk met with thirty-nine-year-old Tiffany Hughes at Peoria’s South Side Mission. They wanted to talk to her about Linda Neal.

Tiffany knew Linda and the other women who had been murdered. And although she wasn’t sure if the information she had would help police find the person who was killing her friends, she decided to tell them her story, just in case.

Like the other women, Tiffany sold herself to get money for drugs. She started when she was just a teenager. A hard life, to be sure. So it was no surprise that when a stranger in a beautiful sky-blue Dodge Dakota—not the normal color for a truck—pulled over and asked her if she wanted to get high, she immediately jumped in. The man, who was white, was between thirty and forty years old and had a normal build. He had shoulder-length reddish brown hair, a moustache, and green eyes. His face and arms were covered with sores.

It was sometime in the beginning of September. Tiffany had just left her aunt’s house on Aiken Street. The guy caught her by surprise when he asked if she wanted to get high. Usually a john asked for sex in exchange for money, but Tiffany didn’t care that this man was different. She just wanted drugs.

The guy told Tiffany he had some crack, but it was back at his house. She went with him without a second thought. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the man. It never did. It didn’t matter that so many women—women she knew—had turned up missing or dead. All that mattered was getting high.

Tiffany told the man she knew a house in the neighborhood where they could buy some crack. He wasn’t interested. Instead, he drove her to his house on Starr Court, just outside of the city. When they arrived, he parked in the front yard. The pair got out of the truck and walked through a large gate attached to a tall wooden fence to get to a small ramshackle house. As they made their way to the man’s residence, Tiffany also noticed another larger house and a pond.

Once inside, Tiffany noticed a bed on one side of the shabby one-room apartment. There was a bathroom, but no kitchen. She also saw some drugs and drug paraphernalia in plain sight on a table in front of a couch.

Before she knew what was happening, the man grabbed her from behind and began beating her and squeezing her throat.

“Bitch, you say anything and I’ll fucking kill you,” the man said as he pushed her down on the bed and started raping her.

Afraid for her life, Tiffany told him that her family would be looking for her if she wasn’t around. She told him her aunt had seen her get in his truck and would go to the police. In fact, she said, some of her relatives were in law enforcement. She was terrified and just wanted him to let her go.

When he was finished, he told her he was a cop, so there was no point telling anyone he raped her because no one would believe her. He also said that neither the truck nor the house was his, so she had no way to identify him. Then, without saying another word, the man walked Tiffany to his truck and drove her back to where he had picked her up.

Tiffany saw the stranger again later that month. It was September 24. Tiffany was walking on Laramie Street with several women, including Linda Neal, when she saw the guy driving his pretty blue Dodge Dakota. Tiffany recognized the man immediately. She warned Linda not to get in the guy’s truck, because he was crazy, but Linda said she’d be fine. She told Tiffany not to worry about her. Tiffany never knew if Linda went with the guy. She only knew that the next day, a group of campers found Linda’s body along a gravel road in a nearby town close to the Mackinaw River.

After hearing about Linda’s death, Tiffany decided to tell police about her run-in with the man in the sky-blue truck. She explained that she had been distressed to see the man in the area again after he raped her. Tiffany told police the guy took her to a house at the end of Starr Court. Police had had previous dealings with a suspect who lived in that area on unrelated charges, so they showed Tiffany some photos of white men, including that suspect.

But Tiffany didn’t recognize any of the men in the photographs as the person who had picked her up, then raped and beat her. Police knew that the suspect they had in mind drove a sky-blue Dodge Dakota pickup truck, so they asked Tiffany if he was the man she saw driving the truck. But she said she was 100 percent sure that he was not the person driving the truck or the man who had raped and beaten her.

Tiffany told police she would be more than willing to cooperate further, and told them where she would be staying. They gave her a card and told her to call if she had any other information to pass along.