Officials at Memorial said they were relieved that “this horrible chapter has been closed,” according to a spokesman.
Relieved. Will lingered on the word. Closed. He read the story to the end, letting the coffee scald the roof of his mouth, but he really wasn’t comprehending the other words. It was the boilerplate of a hundred news stories about murders, usually telling little, often telling outright lies. Something went out of him and he just sat there staring at the table. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe it had been this simple, all along. He suddenly felt so tired, so sad beyond the words even to express it, much less to examine its headwaters. And Will wasn’t that kind of man.
Homicide is not that hard. That’s what the old detective who had broken him in-the man’s name had been Charlie Brill, but everyone called him Bull-had told him when he had joined the detail. Most homicides are simple. Family fights, drug deals gone wrong, disputes over money. Young men with guns and no control over their impulses. Jealousy. Lovers killed each other. Most murder victims knew their killers. Most killers eventually screwed up. Gather evidence. Make an arrest. Take it to the DA. Testify. Simple.
Sometimes one good case solved many others. As a young detective, Bull had worked the Cincinnati Strangler case. Seven women had been raped and strangled in 1965 and 1966. The swirling, lethal dangers of the sixties had come down on never-changing Cincinnati. Will had been in grade school, but he remembered it. The cops had eventually arrested a cab driver after a woman had been found beaten and stabbed in his abandoned cab. The MO hadn’t been the same as the others, who had been strangled. But each murder had been slightly different. One woman had been strangled with a necktie in a park. Others had died thanks to plastic clothesline. Two had been exact copies: women beaten badly and strangled with electrical cord. Bull had said they had a theory, played a hunch: that the cabbie was the strangler. He was convicted on only one murder, but after his arrest, the strangler killings had stopped. One veteran newspaper columnist later compared the case to the Slasher attacks: only one conviction, but no more killings.
Except that the Mount Adams killings hadn’t been simple. Theresa Chambers’ body had been found on an April afternoon when a coworker had become concerned and stopped by to check on her. She had looked through the kitchen window and seen a naked leg and a lot of blood. Inside the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old restored house, the scene had been surreally calm, neat-no broken dishes or overturned tables or chairs. A set of women’s clothes had been neatly folded on a chair, with black panties on top. The body had almost been arranged: completely nude, legs open, arms and hands holding a framed photo of her daughter, who was away at college. Yet all was not calm: the body had been nearly flayed in some places by a very sharp knife, then her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled darkly on the floor. She had been sexually assaulted and semen had been recovered by the medical examiner. And her ring finger had been cut off and taken.
