Murder Theory Read online

  What I learned with Joe Vik was that it wasn’t always easy to call attention to something that seemed plainly obvious. I literally had to drive the bodies I was finding to police stations. Even then, I witnessed a strange kind of mental blindness as they tried to not see what lay before them.

  There’s an apocryphal story, probably completely false and maybe a bit racist, that the Indians of the New World couldn’t see the arriving Spanish ships anchored off their coast because they were so alien to them. We’ll ignore for the moment the hundreds of other first encounters indigenous peoples had with large sailing vessels in which they saw the ships perfectly fine, even swimming out to them—and instead accept that in some cases we don’t want to see the truth before us.

  I have to make very sure that my manufactured massacre gets the attention it deserves, even if it means prompting the authorities and media rather overtly.

  After I cleaned up whatever traces of Theo Cray I may have left at the scene of the crime, I packed everything into my rental truck and drove it two hundred miles back to North Carolina, where I returned it to the agency I borrowed it from.

  My alibi, if I’m ever asked, is that I purchased lab equipment, moved it with the truck, and then had it shipped. I have receipts from a liquidator because I’ve learned that those tiny details are important to keep a story from falling apart. Should this ever come back to me, I don’t want to sit there with a dumb expression if I’m asked why I rented a cargo truck in North Carolina.

  Safe inside my motel room, with my massacre clothes stuffed into a garbage bag inside a dumpster a hundred miles back, it’s time to try to make this blow up.

  Step one: Call the cops.

  I use a virtual private network and launch a calling app on my computer that routes through Europe. To dial Reed County emergency services, I have to use their direct number and not 911.

  “Nine-one-one Emergency Services. What’s the nature of your call?” asks a woman with a mild Kentucky accent.

  “My son and I were just hiking in the woods near the old scout camp near Butcher Creek, and we saw part of a human body sticking out of the ground.”

  “Can you give—”

  I hang up. Now at this point, the operator is trying to decide if this is a prank call or not. Either way, she has to report it to the sheriff’s office. Depending on how seriously they take it, someone could arrive in a half hour or a day. I don’t have that kind of time. So I escalate things.

  I dial the direct line to the sheriff’s office.

  “Reed County Sheriff’s Office. How may I help you?” says a polite man.

  “I saw a body over at Butcher Creek, by the scout camp. I wanted to check, but I heard a gunshot. I’m sorry. That’s all I want to say. Please send someone by there.”

  I make two more similar calls. One to the US Forest Service and another to the neighboring sheriff’s department so they’ll call Reed County and make them aware of it.

  I begin to time the response . . .

  Seventeen minutes later, a Reed County SUV flies past my first camera on Route 22—followed by three police cruisers. Four minutes later, a Colton County SUV screams down the road after them.

  Huh. My hat’s off to them.

  The lead SUV drives up the gravel path to the camp, going past camera number two. I can clearly see the faces of the occupants. A younger deputy is driving and an older man, maybe the sheriff, is sitting in the passenger seat.

  They fly off camera and show up a minute later coming to a screeching halt at the upper left frame of my wide-angle camera disguised as a rain gauge.

  The two men get out of the truck and, despite the urgency with which they arrived at the scene, walk into the camp at a casual pace. I’m relieved they didn’t tumble out with guns blazing. They’re actually handing this quite professionally.

  Let’s see how they handle the scene I left for them.

  While I buried most of the body parts in leaking bags and used a propane tank to saturate the soil so methane probes would go berserk, I still needed to make sure the first responders took this very, very seriously.

  Once more, I’m horrified by what I did. If this doesn’t lead to the capture of Jekyll, I’m going to be haunted by the image of what these two men are going to see for the rest of my life.

  It’s not enough to randomly place some hacked-up body parts around an old camp. If investigators get suspicious about the large amounts of embalming fluid and broken jars and suspect that this may not be a murder but instead some weird hoax, then Jekyll will never show.

  I can’t have all this go to waste. I can’t have Steve’s and all his friends’ deaths end in a poorly planned ruse.

  I need the first people on the scene to have a visceral reaction. Even if they don’t think it’s a serial killer at work, I need them to think something evil happened there.

  That’s why I did what I did.

  Steve forgive me, but when I saw the camp’s firepit and started thinking back about the chopped-up bodies found in Yorkshire, England, I got a terrible idea.

  There’s one term even more sensational and headline grabbing than serial killer.

  As the sheriff and his deputy approach the still-smoldering firepit and see the arm sticking out of the embers with its flesh partially eaten away, I can almost read their minds:

  Cannibal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  FRENZY

  After the first police officer makes a phone call, I wait twenty minutes, then call the tip lines for the two local television news stations. I get an answering machine on one and a bored producer on the other. My message is the same each time: “How come you aren’t reporting on the body found at Butcher Creek?”

  While that alone isn’t enough to cause a news truck to be sent to the remote location, the ensuing phone call to the sheriff’s office from the producers is likely to arouse interest. A “No comment” response will make it sound newsworthy.

  In the event that neither television station feels inclined to look into this, I also send an email to five online reporters I found by Googling local newspapers.

  I then sit back, watch the responding police on my surveillance cameras, and click refresh on my laptop until one of the local news outlets picks up the story.

  It takes two hours. The Blue Mountain Packet is the first to run an item from their crime-beat reporter. The headline is fairly nonsensational:

  Police Investigating Body Found at Butcher Creek Scout Camp

  That’s a start, but I need to goose this a little if I want it to catch fire before the hoax is revealed. I forward the link with an anonymous account to twelve different blogs and Facebook sites that cover serial killers, with an added note:

  My brother was one of the first on the scene. He says they found a half-eaten woman and multiple body parts including babies. FBI being called in. They think it’s a serial killer.

  I added the incorrect embellishments to avoid being too spot-on. If the authorities decide to track down the early leaks, I don’t want to call attention to myself by knowing things nobody should know yet.

  Even though I’m using anonymous email accounts, a browser in incognito mode, and a VPN, there’s a chance I slipped up somewhere. While I doubt investigators would bring the full force of the NSA to track the rumor leaker down, I can’t be too sure.

  In case things don’t go viral, my next step, and a slightly risky one at that, is to create my own ghoulish serial-killer Facebook page and spend several thousands of dollars to promote stories about the Butcher Creek Massacre. By targeting Facebook users with what I assume are Jekyll’s interests—genetics, crime, virology—I can probably get it in front of him, if he even bothers with Facebook.

  My bet is that he gets his news about serial killers through Google News Alerts. This service constantly searches the headlines and sends you updates when ones matching your criteria are published.

  By 11:00 a.m., the police have roped off the scene, covered the body in the firepit, and
started using dogs to search the area. After doing an initial sweep, the sheriff did a good job of clearing the camp so his people wouldn’t trample on evidence.

  Investigators from the Kentucky State Police start to arrive at 1:00 p.m., along with a forensics van. Three men and a woman in uniforms take photographs. Supervisors wearing ties and windbreakers show up as well and confer with the sheriff and his deputies. Uniformed forest service personnel also arrive, and I watch three of them fan out from the camp, combing the grounds.

  I count at least twenty people on my cameras. Everyone seems to recognize one another, but I’m still grabbing close-up shots and adding license plates to my database.

  I’d be shocked if Jekyll showed up this early in the game, let alone even knows about this yet. None of the major news sites is saying “serial killer” or “cannibal” yet. On the news stations’ websites, they’re still reporting that a body may have been found. There’s nothing sensational in the articles. The crime blogs are a little more hyperbolic, using “serial killer” in their headlines, but they don’t carry the same kind of weight as traditional news sources.

  I blame the lack of hysteria on Sheriff Ward. He’s too damned professional. Ward has the scene locked down and has managed to placate the local news. I’d been hoping for more leaks, but so far, I appear to be the only person breathlessly saying there’s a serial killer.

  Damn law enforcement and their professionalism.

  I need to get a little more drastic. It’s risky, but I can’t chance having the jig be exposed before Jekyll shows up. Then the horrible, horrible things I did will be only that.

  After the Joe Vik killings, I was hounded by the press. I got asked to go on every news show, requests for interviews from the New York Times, you name it.

  I ignored all of them. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to them about it only made me even more newsworthy. When I caught Oyo Diallo, the media went insane. Jillian and I had to buy our house using a front company and go to extreme efforts to maintain our privacy.

  The last thing I wanted was to be a talking head on television news, offering my uninformed opinion about whatever was the scandal of the day. Fox offered me six figures to be exclusive to them. I declined. I declined them all.

  While I’m not ready to trade my privacy for a brief amount of attention, I can use the hundreds of email addresses and phone numbers from the media in my Gmail account for my benefit.

  I start with a producer from CNN, one Sandy Garrett. I dial her number and get her voice mail.

  “Hey, this is Dr. Theo Cray returning your call about the Butcher Creek serial killer.”

  Sandy, being a good producer, will probably check her messages in the next hour or so, or at the very least scan the transcriptions and spot my name. Clearly, she knows I didn’t call her before, but she’ll assume I made a mistake, thinking I was calling another producer at a different news organization.

  If all works right, I’ll have attracted attention, created desire, and implied scarcity.

  She calls back two minutes later.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  HOOK

  I ignore the CNN producer’s call. And her second. And her third. I wait an hour before calling her back. During this time, she’s more than likely done a Google search for “Butcher Creek serial killer” and ended up finding the local news items about the body being found, but no mention of a serial killer.

  However, the fact that I left a message about a serial killer has her attention. I keep checking the CNN website to see if they’re running anything yet, but they aren’t. No worries. I can fix that.

  I call her back. She picks up within a second. “Cray?”

  “Yes. Theo Cray. Sorry I missed your calls. I called you by accident,” I say hurriedly.

  “Wait! What’s this I hear about a serial killer in Kentucky? Are you investigating it?”

  “I’m sorry, um, Sandy? I pulled your number from my email when I got a garbled voice mail and accidentally got the wrong producer. My apologies.”

  “Which producer are you trying to reach?”

  “I already spoke to them.” Let her think I’m talking to Fox or MSNBC. I add, “Off the record.”

  “Wait . . . what can you tell me, off the record?”

  “I really don’t think I should. The other producer promised me it would be confidential.”

  “I can guarantee that!” she blurts out.

  “Um, let me think about it.” I need to make her feel the pressure.

  “When can you call me back?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. I’m going to be pretty busy. I have to catch a flight.”

  “To Kentucky?”

  “Er, I can’t say.”

  “Come on, Dr. Cray, give me something.”

  “Ah, I don’t know. But I guess I can, off the record, confirm the rumor.”

  She plays coy. “Which rumor?”

  Two hours ago, a sheriff’s deputy found the plastic bag containing a human head sticking partially out of the ground. I’m sure that’s known locally.

  “About the first victim being found in a firepit and appearing partially eaten. I don’t know about the condition of the other body parts elsewhere.”

  “Other parts,” she repeats as she writes this down.

  “This is off the record? Right? I get asked to help out, but I try to keep it confidential.”

  “Of course. Of course,” she insists. “But could I get a statement from you on the record?”

  I mull this over. The pro is that it will make the story go further, faster. The con is that it will put my name right in the story, which is risky.

  “I can’t have it look like I’m your off-the-record source,” I reply.

  “I have other sources. Don’t worry,” she lies.

  “Okay. Then can it just be a statement?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  I give it a moment’s thought. “This is unlike anything I’ve ever heard about before. Is that okay?”

  “Uh, okay. Can you tell us on the record if you’ll be going to Kentucky or that you’re working with the FBI?”

  “Sorry,” I reply, confirming it but keeping her from saying so. “I have to go.”

  The first headline shows up thirty minutes later next to a map showing Butcher Creek: “Serial Killer at Work in Kentucky, Sources Say.”

  The news copy makes a slight mention of unconfirmed reports of cannibalism and then says, when reached for comment, “Dr. Theodore Cray, investigator behind the Grizzly Killer and Toy Man murders, says this is unlike anything he’s ever heard of before.”

  Fair enough.

  An hour later, CNN has a reporter on the ridge along with a KRTN news truck. A written statement from the sheriff’s department says flatly that this is an ongoing investigation and they have nothing to report.

  Just after 5:00 p.m., the first FBI agents arrive on the scene. By now, Sheriff Ward’s deputies have found a third body part. A foot.

  Ugh, I remember sawing that foot off. I almost cut off my own thumb. Leaving my blood in that scene would be very, very bad.

  Just in case I did somehow contaminate the crime scene, my thin, very thin, excuse was that I was following up an anonymous report a day prior but didn’t see anything. I don’t know how convincing that would be, but given my reputation for bumbling into crime scenes, it might buy me enough time to get a really good lawyer.

  God knows how I’m going to pay for that. I can’t even figure out how I’m going to tell Jillian I spent the money for the extension on our deck to buy a bunch of corpses.

  Um, maybe I don’t tell her that part. The better option would be for me to try to convince her I’ve been keeping a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit a secret.

  By the time of the East Coast evening news, the Butcher Creek Massacre has made headlines. The watershed moment I’d been hoping for happened when someone leaked cell-phone photos of the crime scene to a local news reporter. The shots then went worldwide.
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  I’m sure Sheriff Ward would love to wring the neck of whoever did this. Presently, only the reporter who got the photos and I know the identity of who released them.

  It was Payne Heskins, a Kentucky State Police uniformed officer, who took the photos when nobody was looking. Except for me on my hidden cameras.

  Thank you, Payne, for your lack of professionalism.

  While most media outlets have pixelated the photo of the arm, the creepy image of our Butcher Creek Butcher—that’s the name that stuck—has already made the rounds. The Reddit thread is already more than three thousand posts long.

  If Jekyll doesn’t know about this now, he’s either dead or has given up his serial-killer fixation.

  The next step is to watch my screen and wait for someone to show up who doesn’t belong there.

  Sheila has tried calling me several times, but I don’t want to get into office politics right now. I need to catch a killer. Ideally while he’s still there.

  As night falls and more people show up on the scene, I keep scanning the shadows, hoping to see Jekyll lurking somewhere in the background like a ghoulish Bigfoot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  EXTRAS

  Two days later and all I have to show for it is a growing midsection from all the crap food I’ve been eating in my motel room, a stressed-out girlfriend who’s totally fine but not fine with it, an increasingly frantic office manager I’ve been avoiding, and hours and hours of footage of a diligently managed crime scene.

  Sheriff Ward has kept tight control of the location by establishing several perimeters. He’s blocked off the surrounding forest a half mile out in either direction and has deputies patrolling the outer edges on a regular basis.