Chapter 32
CHAPTER
The thursday after the Beltsville shooting, Sampson and I went to the rehab facility in Bowie, Maryland, where Senate aide Carl Dennis was being treated for his many injuries.
Before we went to his room, his wife, Kathleen, warned us that he was heavily medicated and remembered very little of the night he was run over.
But we had to try. It was hard to look at all the casts, traction cables, tubes, and IV lines that held Dennis together. His head was heavily bandaged. His face was swollen and bruised.
“Carl, hon,” his wife said. “These police detectives want to talk to you about the night you were hit.”
He said, his words sounding slurred, “Don’t ’member.”
“Nothing?” Sampson said.
He thought several beats before he said, “A shot?”
“You heard a shot?”
“Think.”
“What else?”
He closed his eyes a few moments, then opened them. “Lights. Fast. Low lights.”
I thought about what we knew. “Fast, low headlights?”
“Guess.” He shrugged.
I said, “Could it have been vehicle headlights coming at you?”
The Senate aide nodded.
John opened a folder and retrieved a still shot of the white Ford Econoline van. He showed it to Dennis. “Is this the van that ran you over?”
He studied the picture for a long time before shaking his head. “Don’t know.”
“But it could be,” Sampson said.
“Don’t know,” the injured man said, tears coming to his eyes as he looked to his wife in desperation. “Don’t know anything, Kat.”
He began weeping.
His wife moved to his side, rubbing his arm and soothing him. “It’s okay. You heard what the doctors keep saying. This is going to take time, hon.”
He sighed again and shut his eyes.
Kathleen said, “He had a difficult night, Detectives. Can I call you when he begins to remember more of what happened?”
“Of course,” we said, and we left, feeling frustrated that we could not say for sure that the driver of the white van was responsible for the murder of Conrad Talbot and the attempted murder of Carl Dennis.
The next morning, word of my Berkowitz theory leaked.
The headline across the top of the front page of the Baltimore Sun read:
Is Killer Mimicking Son of Sam?
The police department phones began buzzing and jangling with calls from local and national news organizations keying in on the Berkowitz angle.
The media set up camp outside Metro headquarters and squawked about it for hours, even dissecting the fact that the Son of Sam had first killed two women, then a man and a woman, the reverse of the current situation.
The Sun’s original piece—and almost every story afterward—named me as the theorist, noting my doctorate from Johns Hopkins and the parts of my dissertation that included Berkowitz.
I declined to make any comment and deferred to Chief Pittman, who actually proved remarkably adept in the spotlight, running two crisp, efficient press conferences in which he confirmed that Metro and Prince George’s County detectives were looking into a Son of Sam copycat.
“It would be a dereliction of duty if we were not actively looking into Dr. Cross’s theory,” Pittman said on TV as Sampson and I watched from the squad room on Friday.
Detectives Kurtz and Diehl were there in the squad room as well, both with their arms crossed. Pittman went on, “We’re telling people in the greater DC area to beware. He’s now killed three people and gravely wounded a fourth. We want to stop him before there is a fifth.”
Kurtz reached over and clicked off the TV. Diehl shook her head.
“He’s left you dangling, and you don’t even see it, Dr. Cross,” Diehl said, putting heavy sarcasm on the title.
“How so?” I said, ignoring the edge.
Kurtz snorted at my na?veté. “Pittman’s smart.
He’s thought ahead. He’s pinning this all on you, so if things go more sideways than they already have—if you don’t catch someone acting like Berkowitz or if the real killer’s off in a completely other direction and someone dies because of it—well, Pittman can say it was all your idea.
Maybe you don’t survive your three-month probationary period. ”
“Yeah,” Diehl said as she walked away. “Wake up, Doc. You’re in the big leagues now.”