Chapter 33 #2
Richmond detectives and I would speculate endlessly about the infinity symbol.
Had the killer painted it on her? Was he bonding himself with his victims for all eternity, showing his omnipotence and ownership?
Or had Diane Cho painted the symbol on herself earlier?
What did it mean, if anything? What caused the Strangler to target his victims?
Where did he see them? Why did he choose them?
Five days after Diane Cho’s homicide, the Strangler struck again, this time a hundred miles away in northern Virginia.
Forty-four-year-old Susan Tucker, an editor for the U.S.
Forest Service, was murdered in her home.
Arlington County detective Joe Horgas thought the modus operandi was the same as in an unsolved murder four years earlier.
On January 25, 1984, Carolyn Hamm, a thirty-two-year-old Washington, D.C.
attorney, was found dead in her basement, her nude body bound with a venetian blind cord.
She’d been raped and strangled. Her murder reminded Horgas of a series of rapes that remained unsolved in Arlington.
He suspected all the cases were the work of the same perpetrator.
In January 1988, the Southside Strangler was identified as twenty-five-year-old Timothy Spencer based on DNA analysis.
A parolee living in a Richmond halfway house, he was within walking distance of where Debbie Dudley and Susan Hellams lived.
An infinity symbol had been drawn on Spencer’s mattress, but he wouldn’t explain that or anything else till the day he died.
One of the detectives working the cases was my friend Glenn Williams, married with two children.
At the age of thirty-eight he committed suicide the night of February 3, 1988, shooting himself in the chest. I heard about it over the radio as I drove to work the next morning.
When I arrived at the OCME, his body was inside the X-ray room, and I walked in, closing the door.
He was one of the first cops to have a 9mm pistol and apparently grabbed it off the dresser, saying he couldn’t take it anymore.
That’s what I was told by Detective Ray Williams. The unrelenting stress of the Southside Strangler cases apparently had gotten to Glenn and severely impacted his personal life.
He hadn’t been autopsied yet and was covered by a sheet from the waist down.
I marveled at the small hole in his chest that had caused such immeasurable damage.
I remembered him showing me that very pistol when we rode together on evening shifts.
He carried it and his service revolver, predicting that one day all cops would be armed with semiautomatics.
He was always cracking jokes, but I sensed his anxiety.
“Why?” I asked his dead body on the X-ray table. “Why did you have to do that?”
A year later Timothy Spencer would be convicted of capital murder.
I attended the Richmond trial with Marcella during the sentencing phase.
We were sequestered in a private area of the courthouse while she waited to testify.
As she reviewed her paperwork, I headed to find the ladies’ room.
As usual I took a wrong turn, only this one was a doozy.
I opened a door to what I realized wasn’t a bathroom, and there was Timothy Spencer all by himself and unshackled.
His back to me, he leaned over a table, palms flat on it, his head hanging as if he were tired or dejected.
Maybe he was deep in thought, but he didn’t look at me or seem to notice I was there.
I remember his white shirt and dark pants, the V-shape of his upper body.
African American, he was nice-looking and of medium height, not at all scary.
Of course, he wasn’t wearing a mask and armed with a knife climbing through a window.
He’d been groomed for court in hopes of influencing the jury.
I quietly shut the door, astonished he was alone and unrestrained.
Had I not recognized him I would have asked how to find the ladies’ room. I might have struck up a conversation.
He was no more than five feet from me, nobody around.
He could have hurt me badly. Or worse. Marcella testified in gruesome detail about what he’d done to the victims she examined.
She elaborated on what they would have been conscious of, how much they suffered, and for how long.
Spencer would die in the electric chair six years later.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about what the editor Sara Ann Freed had told me. I wondered what Scarpetta would do if the Southside Strangler cases happened on her watch. They were my inspiration for Postmortem. I began writing it while the crimes were going on. There was no way I couldn’t.
I don’t want to say I was forever traumatized by them, but I might have been.
That period was a tumultuous one at the OCME, all of us suspicious of everyone.
If a man arrived to service our microscopes, I wondered if he was the Strangler.
Maybe the killer worked at MCV. I suspected he was someone people paid little attention to, blending with crowds, not drawing attention to himself.
I began to write the novel in late 1987, the working title Death Bell.
But I had no one to send it to and needed an agent.
That wouldn’t be easy after being fired by two of them.
Synchronicity struck again in early 1988 when I attended the dedication of the new Dade County medical examiner’s office in Miami while staying with my dad and Rita.
The Miami Herald’s Pulitzer prize–winning police reporter Edna Buchanan and I were acquainted, and we planned to meet at the dedication, spending the rest of the day together.
She referred me to her literary agent, Michael Congdon, and he agreed to look at Death Bell when I was finished writing it.
That March, Charlie read the first draft.
“You might have done it this time,” he told me over the phone.
I sent the manuscript to Michael Congdon, and he said I needed to make substantial edits.
He spent considerable time going through the draft, tightening it, explaining that a thriller needs to move at a lightning pace.
Too much introspection and background information about characters are deadly, he said.
I decided to change the title to Postmortem.
While we worked on edits over the next few months, I ran the computer system for the OCME as Charlie job hunted.
He began talks with Bill Carl III, the senior minister of a prominent church in Dallas.
The idea of relocating there was impossible for me.
I’d already given up one career when we’d moved to Richmond.
I wasn’t going to do it again. After four years at the OCME and three rejected novels, maybe I’d finally written something that would work. I had a real job with a salary of $27,000. Not a fortune but respectable, and I wasn’t a college student anymore. I was thirty-one years old.
Charlie wanted me to move to wherever he was hired.
It didn’t matter if he hated the location or the job.
He described it as signing a blank check.
That was a hard thing for me to consider, especially when we weren’t getting along.
One early evening I came home from work, and he was in the living room eating dinner while watching the news.
He’d gotten over his amnesia about cooking and had opened a package of chicken breasts, broiling only one of them and making a single salad.
It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might want to eat too, and sometimes it’s the small things that make you realize the big ones.
We loved each other but couldn’t live together. We weren’t a couple anymore.