By Reason of Insanity (12 page)

By mid-July the police net had caught several dozen men who answered to the description of the escaped maniac. A few were close enough to be brothers, the rest bore general resemblances. All had one thing in common: they were not Mungo.

On the morning of July 7 a man was shot to death by a nervous homeowner in Bakersfield. Investigation revealed the dead man to have been a plumber’s helper who was working in the cellar at the request of the homeowner’s wife. She had neglected to tell her husband, who fired his pistol when the intruder didn’t answer his inquiry. The dead man had been deaf.

In Ventura a woman waited behind a door for a midnight burglar. When he entered the room she stuck a knife in his back, then called police to report she had caught the killer. The man was dead when they arrived. He had been a former suitor of the woman, intent on winning her back even if he had to sneak into her house to talk to her.

On July 10, San Francisco police shot a suspect fleeing the scene of a robbery. He was of average height and weight, had brown hair above an ugly face. He wore a watch and a birthstone ring set in onyx. When questioned in the hospital he refused to say anything. Police were jubilant until it was determined that he was Robert Henry Lawson, a bank robber wanted by the FBI.

Two days later, in the most bizarre incident connected with the escape and disappearance of Vincent Mungo, a body was found on a little-used road on the outskirts of Fairfax. The head was missing and so were the arms and legs. A short-sleeved work shirt and cotton pants covered the torso, the pants crudely cut above the knees with a scissors. In the shirt pocket was a scribbled note stating “This is Vincent Mungo.”

There were no identifying marks on the torso—no scars, no cysts, no tattoos. The medical examiner approximated the age as being about twentyfive and the height and weight as average, about 5 feet 9 inches and 150 pounds. He could go no further. Police noted the approximation as fitting Mungo’s description, but without additional proof there was nothing more they could do. After a fingerprint check that proved negative the note was sent to James Oates of the California Sheriffs Office in Forest City.

No one ever came forward to claim the body. It was placed in a freezer locker set year-round at 39 degrees in the Marin County morgue. A padlock was put on the locker until such time as the body was identified or claimed. The file on the grisly discovery has been kept open and the details are a matter of public record.

Besides those who resembled Mungo enough to be picked up by police, and those who innocently or otherwise became ensnared in the dragnet, there were some who involved themselves for one reason or another. At least fifty men walked into police stations to give themselves up. Each was Mungo. Others, perhaps not wanting to appear in public, called and demanded to be arrested over the phone. Either through a misdirected sense of guilt or a pathological need for punishment, most of these men convinced themselves that they were the killer. Others were of course mere publicity seekers grabbing at the spotlight, even if only momentarily, and willing to pay the inevitable price.

The most tragic of the confessions occurred in Fresno during the second week of July. A woman in her mid-twenties, with brown hair and very pronounced masculine features and mannerisms, announced to police that she was Vincent Mungo. She told them a story of how she had been in and out of institutions since childhood, first posing as a boy and later as a man. She had fooled everybody into thinking she was male, so she said, and she had done this because she knew herself to be a man trapped inside a woman’s body. Now she was turning herself in to be punished, she had to be punished because she had killed. The police treated her kindly and escorted her home. In the house they found a two-year-old girl dead in the bathtub. The mother had drowned her daughter in the belief that no one would care for the child when she was once again put away in the institution from which she had escaped.

On July 15 a man was wounded and captured during an armed robbery in Portland, Oregon. It was his seventh holdup of local shops in as many days. In each he announced to the proprietor that he was the deranged killer Vincent Mungo. For those who hadn’t heard the name the gun in his hand worked almost as well. He would then threaten to return if they reported the robbery, going into the most graphic details of how he would kill them. After he left, the shopkeepers quickly called the police, money being an even stronger motivation than fear.

His general description matched that of Mungo. Though he wore a beard, his face resembled the picture on the flyers received by the Portland police earlier. California authorities were notified, and deputies from the Sheriffs Office flew to Portland to interrogate the prisoner. Hopes were raised in Sacramento, in Forest City and Hillside, as well as elsewhere around the state.

In the guarded hospital room the wounded man told police only that he had read of the manhunt and had used the name to terrorize his victims. Beyond that he would say nothing. Some officials believed—hoped—this to be the lie and the earlier version the truth, but continued questioning produced no further answers. He could not be persuaded to talk about himself, nor could he be trapped into giving details of the escape unknown to the general public.

When the routine fingerprint check returned from the regional center in Denver the following morning, the reason for his silence became clear. He was a wanted felon with three warrants out on him in as many states for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Hopes crushed, the deputies sadly returned home from yet another false alarm.

It soon became obvious to California authorities that their insane killer had escaped again, this time from their manhunt. At least from the initial casting of the net. Vincent Mungo was nowhere to be found. He was not in the big cities, he was not in the small towns, he was not in the woods or mountains, and he had not crossed over into another state. He had simply disappeared, or he was so well secluded that it amounted to the same thing. Apparently without money or friends, and with a face quickly recognized by peace officers anywhere, he had succeeded in eluding capture. That he had lasted the first three days was miraculous; that he had remained at large for several weeks was beyond comprehension. Yet he was somewhere within the state— he just had to be.

A stakeout had been placed round the clock on the home of Mungo’s relatives in Stockton, but he failed to show there. Another was laid at the nearby home of a man he had once threatened to kill, again without result. Police watched movie houses in the San Francisco Bay area, movies being a favorite pastime of Mungo. They checked penny arcades and amusement parks, other favorite haunts. They even looked into the hobby shops, since glue-sniffing had been his chief vice as an adolescent. No matter what was pulled into the net, their quarry slipped through.

Woodsmen and climbers in the northern edge of the state around the mountainous ranges were asked to report anything unusual. They spotted a number of campfires, but all proved to be legitimate. One climber was feared missing and police units rushed to the scene, suspecting foul play, but he showed up unharmed three days later.

In the southern part of the state police helicopters skirted much of the area between Death Valley on the Nevada border and the San Bernardino Mountains, sighting nothing out of the ordinary except the wreckage of a private plane lost a year earlier. At Barstow on the Mojave Desert an abandoned car was found containing the bleached body of a young man. Excitement mounted until it was learned that the unidentified male had been no older than eighteen and had probably been Mexican.

On July 18 the body of a woman believed to be in her early fifties was discovered in a roadside gully midway between Yuba City and Sacramento. She had been dead about ten days and the body was badly decomposed and almost totally dehydrated. Maggots had eaten away most of the brain. Yet the cause of death was readily apparent from the crushed skull and broken bones, injuries typical of a hitand-run victim on fast roads. An autopsy revealed only that the woman had been a heavy drinker and smoker and had suffered from arthritis. Local police listed the death as a probable vehicular homicide on or about July 8, and sent a routine report to the Sheriff’s Office in Sacramento. A check was made through Missing Persons to see if anyone answering the woman’s description had been reported missing. None had, and because the original report stated vehicular homicide it was not until much later that the terrible significance of the date was seen.

The unthinkable, at least for the authorities, occurred on July 19, a wet and thoroughly miserable day in much of northern California. On that afternoon an elderly woman was savagely attacked in her home and literally hacked to death. When police arrived they found blood everywhere in the room and an axe next to the body. Then their eyes widened in genuine concern. On the woman’s right hand the index finger had been cut off. A quick search showed it was missing. The area was sealed off and by nightfall the house looked like a Hollywood set, with bright lights and various police cars and every law-enforcement official in the state seemingly there, including Sheriff James Oates and Lieutenant John Spanner of Hillside. The woman had lived less than thirty miles from Willows State Hospital.

Sheriff Oates grabbed Spanner in back of the house where they could be alone for a moment. “Mungo,” he said through clenched teeth. “I knew it’d come to this, I knew he’d kill again.” He caught Spanner’s surprised look. “I mean when we didn’t catch him the first few days,” he said hastily. “The bastard’s kill-crazy, that’s what it is all right.” Spanner wasn’t so sure. “Let’s check the axe with Willows. See if it could’ve come from there,” he said thoughtfully. He looked perplexed, uneasy, and Oates asked him why. By now the sheriff was ready to listen to anything.

“It’s the finger,” Spanner told him. “I don’t understand it. With the finger off, everybody knows it’s Mungo, just the same as if he wrote his signature.”

“All these nuts are ego maniacs, ain’t they?” Oates asked plaintively. “Remember that little blond gal in Daly City that told all her friends she was the killer they were looking for? And what about all the nuts who do something dumb to get caught so they can tell everybody how many they killed?” He rubbed his nose. “They’re all the same.”

“I don’t think Mungo’s like that,” said Spanner. “He seems to know exactly what he’s doing. And he’s been smart enough to outwit us so far.” Oates frowned, not needing to be reminded of that fact. “I think he wants very much to stay anonymous, to get lost in the crowd. It’s his only chance.”

Oates shrugged. “So how do you explain this?”

“I can’t. That’s the point—it doesn’t fit.”

“It don’t have to fit if he’s a nut.”

Spanner smiled wearily. “He may be a nut in the homicidal sense but they have their own logic. They plan things out like the rest of us, sometimes a lot better.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re not going to get away with saying that because he’s crazy he’s bound to act irrationally. From what he’s managed so far, I’d say it’s about the opposite.” He looked directly at Oates. “Anyway, why take the finger at all? Assuming he doesn’t want the publicity.”

“That’s easy. To get the ring, same as last time.”

“What ring?”

“The ring she must’ve been wearing on her—” He stopped, puzzled, as though an unexpected thought had struck him.

“Exactly,” said Spanner, nodding. “Women don’t wear rings on the right index finger. Some young girls might, but not an old woman like this. They wear them on the left hand, and if anything’s on the right it’s on the ring finger, not the index.”

The sheriff swore loudly.

“When I saw the hands before,” continued Spanner, “she had just a plain wedding band, where it should be. So she didn’t go in much for rings.”

“Then why chop the finger off?” asked the sheriff helplessly.

“I don’t know,” said Spanner quietly. Then with sudden urgency: “Check out the axe. And if I were you I’d talk to the neighbors and relatives. Might be more here than we know.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” Spanner laughed. “I’m going home unless that axe came from Willows. This is out of my jurisdiction.” He sounded relieved. “It’s all yours, Jim.”

The sheriff groaned and uttered an obscenity, not an easy thing to do at the same time.

In the second week of July the weather throughout the upper half of the state had become sufficiently hot to cause comment and general irritability, nowhere more than above San Francisco and extending up past the Clear Lake region. Here the air just sat still for days, hardly rustling the leaves, and people found good excuses to sit still with it. In a small rural community about forty miles from Willows State Hospital, the community where Sara Bishop had lived and died, a makeshift auction was being held on the lawn of a large two-story frame house that had recently been repainted. For many years the house belonged to an elderly spinster who had died six weeks earlier, leaving it to a favorite nephew who was now conducting the auction in lethargic fashion.

On the lawn were several dozen pieces of furniture of varying sizes and shapes. Some were eminently worthless beyond the strictly functional, others approached antiquity and were the only things that aroused any kind of spirited bidding by the small crowd on that afternoon. Along with the furniture, ranged in uneven rows on the newly cut grass, were dozens of cartons of pots and pans, ancient tools, bedspreads, curtain rods, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records, and assorted bric-a-brac. At one end were baskets of children’s toys, mostly broken, and shopping bags of weather-beaten clothing. At the other end of the rows of general merchandise were numerous standing lamps with fabric shades and a huge birdcage. About the only common denominator among the items was the nephew’s desire to be rid of them.

While his aunt was alive, all had graced her home. She had been raised in the town, moving to the frame house when she was still a young lady. Beaux had courted her on its front steps or in its parlor and been finally rejected; others had come once and rejected her. Dreams had been born there, and plans made. Not all came true. When her father died she took care of her mother, first as a companion, then as a nurse. She was their only child, a fact she was never allowed to forget. She was fifty-two when her mother died, and too old for children of her own. She had performed her duties with honor and virtue, and as the years passed she remained alone in the house she loved, reading her books and listening to her records and feeding her birds. She let the grass grow around the house, and collected cast-off toys, which she gave to the town’s needy children.