It astonishes me too, that while I sat there in Eppes Hall, internally groaning for the professor to wrap it up—by a certain point, he was only echoing the arguments from the reading—Kimberly must have been wishing for a stay as The Defendant slowed to a stop alongside a rural dirt road deep within the Suwannee River State Park. He would have been terrifying to her from the moment she laid eyes on him. Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to compliant young women for help, which we’d been conditioned since birth to answer the same way he’d been conditioned since birth to expect a woman to take care of him. By the time he snatched his final and youngest victim, he was operating in a desperate and brazen state. I think often about the forces that allowed his abominable last act to occur, how, if not for the corrupt everyday men in the Colorado legislature insisting on The Defendant’s extradition for reasons other than justice, Kimberly Leach would be fifty-seven years old today. An age so young it is one year younger than Sandra Bullock.
At last the lecture came to a close, and then I was hurrying back to The House to meet the Coke delivery man, who had not received a copy of the new key and would not ever again. My trust in even those who deserved it had eroded. I had ten minutes to get there and back across campus for economic growth policy at Dodd Hall. I wanted time to slow down at the same time Kimberly was probably wishing it would speed up. When her body was finally found, the pathologist determined she had sustained a massive injury to her pelvic region before she died.
I imagine that as I hoofed it back across campus, checking the watch on my wrist, Kimberly and I were at last in sync with our experience of time. Feeling like there wasn’t nearly enough for all the things we had to do.
* * *
It would take another eight days for the casual two-knuckled rap on the door. Lunchtime on a Friday. I said a muffled hello to Detective Pickell and Sheriff Cruso through a peanut butter mouth. Their faces were pleasant but bordering on impatient.
“We left word for you,” Cruso said.
I chewed, chewed, forced myself to swallow the last bite of my sandwich. “I was just eating a quick lunch. I didn’t have time to check the board.”
“We have some follow-up questions,” Cruso said.
I glanced at Pickell, who nodded. Follow-up questions.
I went to get my coat, heart beating loud and slow, the dramatic death march that sounded whenever I thought I might have done something wrong. I assumed they’d heard about me going to Colorado, sticking my nose into official police business. I was cold with dread as I followed them out to their car.
In the back of their big tan sedan, I told Pickell that we were doing okay when he asked how we were getting on at The House. The rest of the drive passed in taut silence. Yes. I was definitely in trouble.
Pickell led me to the same small room where he and Sheriff Cruso had conducted our first interview. Sheriff Cruso returned with two coffees and one sugar packet to split between the two of us. He’d remembered that we took our coffee the same, and I hoped that meant he had some affection for me, that he’d show me some mercy.
“Do you know what a photographic lineup is, Pamela?”
I gaped at Sheriff Cruso. I was prelaw and I watched television. Of course I knew what a lineup was. I also knew that a lineup occurred only after a suspect had been arrested. I tried to temper my excitement. Roger could be that suspect. Then again, would they really bring me there to pick out someone I knew as well as I did Roger?
“I do,” I answered as nonchalantly as I could.
Sheriff Cruso signaled Pickell, who produced a three-ring binder. He set it on the table while Sheriff Cruso explained why I was there and what he needed me to do.
Inside were twenty-nine photographs of Caucasian men in their late twenties and early thirties, stored in plastic-slip pages and numbered in charcoal pencil. I was instructed to go through each page carefully to see if I recognized the man I’d seen at the front door in the early-morning hours of January 15. It was like a man proposing without getting down on one knee. This was such a huge moment, but it all felt so unceremonious.
Around suspect nineteen, panic set in. The Defendant’s face was nowhere to be found.
“There is no rush,” Sheriff Cruso said, sensing my anxiety.
“No one is trying to trick you,” Pickell added. I believed him that they weren’t trying, but still I felt tricked.
“Can I start from the beginning again?” I asked. The pages were running out, the left side of the binder heavier than the right. Maybe he had been there and I’d missed him.
“Take as long as you need,” Cruso said.
I flipped back to the beginning, went through the first half again. I hadn’t missed him. I was sure of it. I proceeded past suspect nineteen. Near the last page, my heart boomed with relief and recognition.
“This one,” I declared confidently. I placed a fingernail beneath suspect number twenty-seven. It was The Defendant, wearing a black turtleneck, sporting a costumey handlebar mustache.
Sheriff Cruso’s demeanor gave no indication as to whether I’d chosen correctly or not. “Do you feel this is definitely the person you saw, or do you feel this is a striking resemblance?” He used his fingers to cover up The Defendant’s hair and neck so that only his face was visible.
A spike of fear, of not wanting to close down my options so quickly. But I answered firmly, “That is definitely the person I saw.”
“Please read the photograph’s number out loud for me.”
“Twenty-seven,” I said, too loud.
“This concludes the photographic lineup. Time is two-oh-eight p.m., Friday, February seventeenth, 1978.” Sheriff Cruso switched off the recorder.
“Has there been an arrest?” I asked. “I haven’t seen anything on the news.”
“Miss Schumacher,” Sheriff Cruso admonished with a teasing smile. I should know he wasn’t at liberty to disclose that kind of information, not even to me, The Eyewitness. He stood and held open the door. “Thank you for your time. Hopefully, Leon County won’t need any more of it.”
But Leon County would—a lot more of it. The next day, Saturday, I woke to find The Defendant smiling in handcuffs on the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat, wearing a pretentious alpine-style sweater on his way into circuit court in Pensacola, the westernmost city of the Panhandle. The bizarre tale of his capture had started at one thirty a.m. on Wednesday, six days after Kimberly Leach went missing and approximately one month after Denise and Robbie were killed and Jill, Eileen, and the student in the off-campus apartment on Dunwoody were nearly bludgeoned to death. The article described how a Pensacola patrolman stopped a man in a Volkswagen that had been reported stolen in Tallahassee earlier this month. How the man attempted to run from the car after a high-speed chase.
At the city jail, the prisoner gave his name as Kenneth Raymond Misner, twenty-nine, of Tallahassee. Though he carried Misner’s identification papers and a number of stolen credit cards, the real Kenneth Misner, a former FSU track star, soon came forward.
By Friday morning, detectives had developed a hunch that their prisoner was The Defendant. Two hours later, FBI agents arrived with Wanted posters and fingerprints. Two hours after that, Pickell and Sheriff Cruso had shown up at my door.
References were made to the fact that The Defendant was indeed in Tallahassee during the month of January, when the FSU slayings took place; and that some of the other crimes The Defendant was sought for also involved blunt weapons, sexual assault, and strangulation.
One of the investigators said there was evidence that The Defendant had rented a room in an apartment complex in Tallahassee, known among FSU grad students as The Oak. They were combing through it for evidence now. I sat down hard, my kneecaps turned to taffy. Read that again. The Oak. The hairs at the base of my skull were bristled, painful quills.
The Oak was two blocks away. All this time, he had been my neighbor.
RUTH
Issaquah
Spring 1974
One thing you did that always made me angry.