Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (14 page)

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Weber came to Chicago to win her back. When she refused to

resume their relationship, he became enraged. According to what

Lynda told friends, he threatened to kill her and her parents. Before

he left her dormitory apartment, he poured his cologne over her bed

sheets, as if marking territory with his scent. Lynda was so shaken

by his threats that she considered seeking a protective order against

him, but decided not to pursue it, perhaps afraid that to do so would

only inflame the situation.

According to the attorney who would come to represent Weber,

Kevin Smith, who supervises homicide and death penalty prosecu-tions in the Cook County public defender’s office, Weber was fixated

on Asian women, and Lynda in particular. Although she tried to

move on with her life over the next four months, Don either quit or

lost his job in New York, dropped out of school, and moved back to

his parents’ home in Robinson, where he bided his time performing

manual labor and brooding about Lynda.

‘‘He had this obsessive view that she was part of his perfect life, and

he couldn’t have this life without her,’’ said Smith. ‘‘He was overcome

with this idea that if he couldn’t have Lynda, no one could.’’

According to his attorney, Don heard that Lynda was making plans

to visit relatives in Thailand with her new boyfriend, as they once

had, and interpreted this as meaning that the two were preparing to

be married.

On the night of April 16, 1990, Weber secretly borrowed his

stepmother’s car and drove unannounced back to Lynda’s dorm

armed with a .22-caliber pistol. Along the way he stopped and bought

soda pop, fashioning the container into a homemade silencer—which

he told his lawyer he learned how to make from an article he read in

Field & Stream
magazine.

‘‘I told her I was sorry but I couldn’t live with what she had done,’’

Weber said in an interview. He pulled the gun out of his backpack

and shot her six times in the chest.

He claims he waited around for an hour after she died, fully

expecting the police to burst in and arrest him. But if he wasn’t

planning and hoping to get away with murder, why did he use a

silencer? Apparently the device worked. No one heard a thing. So

he cleaned up the blood, zipped Lynda’s body inside a sleeping bag,

and carried her corpse, secreted inside a laundry hamper, nine stories

down to his stepmother’s car. He drove straight back to Robinson

and hid her body beneath some auto parts in a dump.

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Then he did something very strange, perhaps as symbolic as

spraying his scent on Lynda’s bed sheets. By his own account, he took

a ring off her finger and buried it, along with some other personal

items he had taken from her room, in a cemetery. Why did the ring

deserve a more dignified resting place than Lynda herself, whom he

literally threw out like trash? It seems as if he were mourning the death

of an illusion—the relationship, as symbolized by the ring—but not

the death of the woman. He was stripping her not only of her life but

also of any object he considered meaningful.

Several months later, however, fearing that her remains might be

discovered in the dump, he decided to move her to a more secure

location. He retrieved her corpse and drove fifteen hundred miles

across the country, finally pulling off the highway near Flagstaff,

Arizona, where he buried her in a national forest. ‘‘He just drove

until he saw what looked like a good place to bury a body,’’ says Smith.

Q

After a friend reported Lynda missing, police found her dorm

room locked, her keys and wallet inside, her car parked nearby. The

only physical evidence possibly indicating foul play was two small

spots of dried blood on the floor—too little to test for DNA or even

to match to Lynda’s blood type, thanks to Weber’s diligent clean-up

efforts. And if it was Lynda’s blood, there could be an innocent

explanation for how it happened to fall there, such as during one of

the frequent nosebleeds Lynda was known to suffer.

‘‘We don’t have any proof that a crime has been committed,’’ the

lieutenant overseeing the missing persons investigation declared a

few weeks later. ‘‘There isn’t enough evidence to indicate anything.’’

It is a conundrum that makes cracking eraser crimes so chal-lenging: without obvious evidence of a crime scene, police may not

be persuaded that any crime at all has occurred. The investigation

into the disappearance of Lynda Singshinsuk was assigned not to

homicide detectives but to the Chicago Police Department’s youth

division because Lynda fell into an age group that led police to view

her as likely to be a runaway. The homicide squad was assisting only

in an advisory capacity.

Consequently, the investigation tilted toward the theory that Lynda

had run off somewhere voluntarily or committed suicide rather than

that she had been the victim of a crime—despite the fact that she was

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a dedicated medical student pursuing her lifelong dream of becoming

a doctor like her father. It also didn’t make sense that she would have

run away without her car, credit cards, or checkbook. Authorities

searched Lake Michigan for weeks, thinking that if she had taken her

own life, she would most likely be found in the lake just outside her

dorm.

There were reasons to suspect that Weber might have harmed her.

Police quickly learned from Lynda’s family and friends that Don had

not taken their breakup well. Two months before she disappeared,

Weber called Lynda’s mother and threatened to damage Lynda’s

medical career by distributing sexually explicit pictures he had taken

of her unless they paid him $20,000—recompense, he said, for all

the money he claimed to have spent on Lynda over the years. When

the family failed to accede to his blackmail demands, he mailed some

of the photos to other students in her dorm.

Weber had no ironclad alibi for the day Lynda disappeared, but

there was no evidence that he was anywhere near Chicago at the

time, having driven there and back the same night without even his

parents knowing that he had ever left Robinson. The fact that he was

a lawyer himself from a respected family, who had also engaged a

prominent defense attorney to represent him after he was questioned

about sending the intimate photos, helped keep police at bay. They

insisted he was not even a suspect.

At their wits’ end, Lynda’s parents offered a $30,000 reward for her

safe return and took out ads in the newspaper promising not to press

charges if anyone who might have kidnapped Lynda set her free. On

Christmas Day, eight months after Lynda vanished, the Singshinsuks

received a shocking call: Weber telephoned them asking for $50,000

in exchange for telling them where they could find their daughter. It

was both astonishingly malevolent and foolish. Weber managed to be

careful and clever enough in carrying out the murder that it appeared

he would never be prosecuted. But he could not resist exploiting and

tormenting Lynda’s family with his knowledge of their daughter’s

fate, a clear example of narcissism and Machiavellianism trumping

the savvier self-preservation aspects of psychopathy.

After receiving this call, the Singshinsuks hired a private detective

to do what police had failed to do: find their daughter’s body and

bring her killer to justice. The family employed Jay J. Armes, who

gained national attention in the early 1970s after he managed to find

and rescue Marlon Brando’s young son, who was kidnapped and

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slipped out of the country in the midst of a custody dispute. Armes

traced phone calls by Weber to the Singshinsuks and some of his

relatives and discovered that he was calling from Chiang Mai, an area

in Northern Thailand known as a haven for sex tourism.

Armes flew there, following a slender trail of clues Weber had left

behind. It was difficult detective work because many locals in Chiang

Mai are protective of the semilegal and illegal sex industry, and do not

welcome inquiries of any kind. Armes, of course, had no official status

to help open doors. After visiting countless hotels, showing Weber’s

picture around, Armes tracked Weber to a room where he discovered

that the American had already hooked up with a Thai girl who looked

eerily similar to Lynda. He was eking out a living teaching English

and seemed to have settled in with his Lynda substitute, beyond the

arm of the law back home even if U.S. authorities could be persuaded

of his involvement in Lynda’s disappearance.

As if finding Weber weren’t difficult enough, Armes now faced

a monumental challenge. He needed not only to induce Weber to

admit he killed Lynda and identify where he had hidden her body

but also, ideally, to get him back to the United States so he could be

held accountable. And, as merely a private investigator, he had to do

all this without any real leverage—no money to offer Weber for his

cooperation, no ability to cut a deal with prosecutors, no legal threats

to hang over the killer’s head, no police power in either the United

States or Thailand to back him up. In fact, Weber was not even a

wanted man. There were no charges pending against him. Indeed, he

had gotten away with murder.

Weber admitted to the investigator that he had come to Thailand

specifically to avoid prosecution, as Thailand had no extradition

treaty with the United States at the time (although it is clear from

Weber’s fixation on young Southeast Asian women that the lack of

extradition was not Thailand’s only attraction). As a lawyer, Weber

was beyond any empty threats a wily private investigator might

attempt to use. Nevertheless, in what must be one of the most

remarkable engagements between an investigator and an eraser killer

on record, Armes managed to establish a rapport with Weber and

gain his trust. By assuring him that Lynda’s family was not interested

in prosecuting him but only wanted to find their daughter’s body,

Armes got Weber to confess to him.

When psychopaths confess, there is no dam-burst of pent-up

emotion—that mixture of pain, remorse, pity, and self-pity that

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constitutes contrition in other criminals. Weber wasn’t tearful or

remorseful when he described what he did to Lynda. In Armes’s

words, ‘‘When he was talking about killing her, you would have

thought he was talking about killing a chicken.’’

The private eye also talked Weber into drawing a crude map of

where he had buried Lynda. Armes flew home and searched the area

Weber had indicated with both metal detectors and cadaver dogs,

but found no body. Armes called Weber back and, with the same

assurances, convinced a very reluctant Don to return to the United

States and help him find the unmarked grave. He sent him an airline

ticket to the United States, personally flew him on to Flagstaff in his

own private plane, then drove him out to the national forest where

they dug until they found a foot.

Weber had been so wary of a setup that he took Armes on a

circuitous route to the grave to make sure they were not being

followed. Little did he know that FBI agents were already hiding in

the woods near the place Weber had mapped out. As soon as the

body was uncovered, the agents swept in and arrested him.

Q

Having literally led authorities to Lynda’s grave, there was no way

Weber could deny putting her there. He gave prosecutors a detailed

confession and, after being assigned a public defender, shocked

Smith, one of the most experienced capital case defenders in the

country, by refusing to cooperate in preparing a defense. The state

was seeking the death penalty, and Smith wanted to explore whether

depression and the painkillers Weber was taking may have played a

role in his actions— if not for a full-out insanity defense, then at least

as mitigation in the penalty portion. But Weber told his attorney he

wouldn’t fight the charges. He wanted to die.

Of the hundreds of murders I’ve researched that I believe could be

classified as eraser homicides, I can count on one hand the number of

killers who ever took any measure of responsibility for their actions.

In most if not all of those instances, it could be argued that their

decision to plead guilty was more selfish than noble—they were

caught dead to rights and had little choice but to cut a deal, often to

eliminate the possibility of receiving the death penalty. Other than an

insanity defense, there was no credible way for Weber to say he was

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not responsible for Lynda’s death. But to actively lobby for execution

is extraordinary and unprecedented among eraser killers. Still, even

his own attorney wasn’t sure if what his client felt was actual remorse

or something more narcissistic.

His family could afford to hire private counsel for Weber, but

they refused to help him. His father and brothers, self-reliant men

to the core— one brother a doctor, another a fighter pilot, his father

a successful businessman—wanted nothing more to do with him.

Smith believes Weber’s wish to be executed was really a desire to

escape the untenable situation in which he found himself. He was

grieving not so much what he had done to Lynda but what had

become of his life.

‘‘In terms of where the focus is, in genuine remorse there has to

be a level of selflessness and concern and empathy for the victim,

more so than for yourself,’’ said Smith. ‘‘Here there was concern, but

not for the victim. The overriding thing was ‘Poor me, look at what

she has done to me, I can’t get on with my life, I’ve embarrassed my

family.’ In terms of what the motivating factor was I think it was more

self-pity: ‘If I’m dead I don’t have to deal with this.’ It was like, ‘God,

I’ve screwed things up, and I’m never going to have a productive life,

so I might as well just take this way out.’ ’’

As the time set for trial grew closer, Weber changed his mind. He

began to buy into the idea that maybe something was mentally wrong

with him. On the eve of jury selection, a deal was struck. Smith had

made it clear that the defense planned to use the explicit photographs

Don had taken of Lynda as part of its case, to show the extent of the

relationship and Don’s obsession with her. Lynda’s parents did not

want to be put through a trial that sullied their daughter’s memory

any further. If Weber agreed to plead guilty and admit responsibility

for his crime, they were amenable to sparing his life.

The plea was entered in February 1992. In a barely audible voice,

Weber apologized for killing his ‘‘best friend’’ and for the pain he

caused her family and his own. He was sentenced to seventy years

in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2028, when he will be

sixty-eight.

‘‘At the very end, I think there was a component of sorrow for

what he had done to her, wanting to do the right thing for her family

if for nothing else,’’ his attorney says. ‘‘In the end it came close to

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