Evil Season (18 page)

The other mystical power Murphy experimented with during his time with Dave Gallant was hypnotism—and Murphy eventually became proficient at it.

“It started out with Dave hypnotizing me a couple of times,” Murphy said. The first time Gallant put him under, they attempted a half-successful regression. He saw ancient clothing—robes and sandals—on men and women. Another time Gallant hypnotized Murphy in a simple attempt to help him relax.

Gallant said he could hypnotize people without their knowledge. That notion appealed to Murphy immediately for selfish reasons.

“All I could see were opportunities to take advantage of people for money and frequent sexual gratification,” Murphy remembered.

He couldn't wait to learn how to do it, already fantasizing about how to get what he wanted from those totally under his majik spell. (Murphy specified that when he referred to his powers “majik” was the correct spelling.)

The bad thing about learning how to hypnotize people without their knowledge was that—unlike making a Ouija drawing of a dragon—he couldn't practice alone.

It was while practicing his hypnosis techniques that he began to have problems at work with clients—inappropriately touching the ladies when he was supposed to have been cutting their hair.

His preparation for his first field hypnosis experiment had been sufficient, he thought. He had taken everything he had learned from Gallant and had added to that what he had learned from reading a book about hypnotism during several lengthy visits to Barnes & Noble.

“I was armed and ready for the unsuspecting public,” Murphy said.

The hypnosis program was like throwing a bone to the
“kidnap, rape, kill”
voices in his head, like teen girls who combated suicidal feelings by seeing how often and deep they could cut their own wrist without hitting a vein.

He geared his preplanning toward haircut clients who, more than anyone else, were a captive audience. Indeed, the subjects were chosen just as rape-and-murder victims would have been chosen if he had given in to the relentlessly taunting voices in his head. When choosing subjects for hypnotism, breast size was a criterion.

He began by planting hypnotic suggestions into his usual haircutting banter. He was impressed with his own ability to blend the suggestions seamlessly into the conversation. The subject had no clue what was happening to her.

“Only once did someone catch on to my shenanigans,” Murphy said. She was a pretty twenty-four-year-old, and he was shampooing her hair when she said, “Hey, you're trying to hypnotize me, aren't you? It won't work. Nice try, though!”

He only worked at the Regis in Orange Park for three months, mid-January through April Fools' Day, largely because he often had things on his mind other than cutting hair when dealing with clients.

That job ended when he had a bridge-burning quarrel with the manager, Marguerite Bradley, who didn't like Murphy's workplace demeanor. She'd warned him twice. The conversations about spiritualism, guaranteed to make anyone within earshot tense up, had to stop. The rule was, no talk about politics or religion, and spiritualism counted as religion ! The first time, it was just a warning; the second time, she suspended Murphy for a week without pay. That steamed him and he quit.

(Years later, Bradley testified at Murphy's murder trial. He believed that she lied on the stand, saying he'd been fired, when he clearly remembered quitting.)

“The voices were driving me mad,” he later admitted. Rape. Kill. Rape. Kill. All day and all night. “There were so many women that I nearly killed. It's unbelievable.”

 

 

Murphy carried a weapon in his backpack everywhere he went. It was either his combat knife, with a seven-inch blade, or a hatchet, which he'd purchased at Home Depot for $6.

“The hatchet came in very handy during burglaries. It could be used both to smash out windows and to pry open doors,” Murphy explained.

Sometime during his decline of 2003, Murphy purchased a stun gun. He used it on one occasion and was disappointed: “I found it ineffective.”

The client who could tell he was trying to hypnotize her was the exception to the rule. For the most part, Murphy was an excellent hypnotist with many, many successes.

He could
thoroughly
hypnotize subjects without them realizing it. Like the planchette-and-ink experiment, Murphy knew his claims of hypnotic prowess would strike some readers as bragging. Or, worse, as evidence that he was a schizophrenic suffering from hallucinations.

“They say you can't get a person who is under hypnosis to do anything that they normally wouldn't do unhypnotized. I am telling the truth, as God is my witness, that this is not true,” Murphy said. He could not only hypnotize a subject without the subject knowing it, but also without being noticed by anyone in the room. People in the waiting area and other hairstylists would watch him doing his thing, and they would have no idea what he was up to. It got to the point where practically every female who got into his chair was groped. Sometimes he would squeeze their breasts; at other times he'd get right in there between their legs and rub them sensuously on their most private areas. They would sit there in the chair like zombies, not reacting at all to the touching. They were unseeing, unknowing. When he'd had his fill of feeling them up, he'd open their purses and remove the money. Twenties, fifties, the occasional hundred-dollar bill.

When men had their hair cut, he skipped the feeling-up stuff. Usually he just dropped a posthypnotic suggestion that they should tip really well. Everyone in the chair was hypnotized to some degree.

 

 

On July 22, 2003, Murphy was ticketed for “failure to yield right of way,” involving a car accident in Hillsborough County. Murphy was driving a 1991 Mercury, which belonged to Dave Gallant. Murphy was cited for a traffic violation in connection with the incident. He did not contest the infraction and was ordered to take a course in driver improvement.

When Murphy moved out of Gallant's apartment, he moved to a dilapidated but homey mobile home in Gibsonton. He wanted a place of his own, where there was plenty of room for his “spiritual images.” He had progressed past the Ouija board. He could summon even larger and more sophisticated images from the souls and spirits without a planchette. He invented a new contraption, cutting the bottom out of an empty butter bowl. He would turn the bowl upside down and insert as many as a dozen different-colored felt-tip markers into the hole. He'd set the bowl on a piece of folded fabric, which served as his canvas. He would then summon a soul and walk away. After a couple of hours he'd return to look at the completed image. He would slowly unfold the cloth to reveal the spirit world's latest creation. They were phenomenal. Making the images consumed his time; soon the walls of his new home were covered with them.

On September 2, 2003, Murphy pawned a Weller soldering gun and two knives at the Universal Jewelry and Pawn on West Brandon Boulevard in Brandon. He pawned a Samsung color TV and an auto battery charger at a second pawnshop, also on Brandon Boulevard, on September 23, 2003.

Around that time he stole a nice bicycle. He checked it out on the Internet. It was worth almost $3,800.

During 2003, Murphy's art also consisted of paint on plates, creating images that only he could see. He wanted his brother and sister-in-law to sell the plates in their gift shop, but they refused, frightened at this new level of delusion. (Eventually, when Murphy said he would be moving to Sarasota in December of 2003, they were glad to give him a ride.)

During the final months of 2003, Murphy lived at a series of Florida addresses, in St. Petersburg, St. Pete Beach, and Oldsmar. By the December holidays he lived on Shade Avenue in Sarasota, near Bee Ridge Road, in a rooming house, in one of six single-room, low-ceiling apartments. He found the place by answering an ad in the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
His room, known hyperbolically as “apartment B,” had “immediate access to the bath and kitchen.”

Like most digs for transients, the place was a madhouse. Transients, after all, rarely count stability among their strong points. But the house did have one thing going for it, from Murphy's point of view: a great landlady!

Kit Barker, the owner, had gone out of her way to give the place homey touches, like the white picket fence that opened up to allow access to the front walk leading to the door. There was a carved flower at the top of each freshly painted picket.

Just in front of the door was a round garden, walled off from the walk that surrounded it by bricks. It was covered with mulch and featured a combination of interestingly shaped large rocks and plants. There were lights set up so that the garden (and, importantly, the front door) was illuminated at night.

Murphy thought it was a nice place, even before he entered the building. Right away, the landlady charmed him. Barker told Murphy that she was a former Hollywood stuntwoman. She showed him a newspaper clipping, an article about the lady daredevil and her Hollywood exploits with glamorous movie stars. She had an office in the back of the first floor, but she wasn't there all the time because she had a second home in North Carolina.

Murphy's rent was $100 a week, and he paid from the end of December until the middle of February. Kit Barker remembered Murphy as a guy who caused little trouble. “He said he was a hairdresser and an artist,” the landlady recalled.

Cops were
always
being called to the Shade Avenue address—before, during, and after Murphy's time living there. But the calls almost never involved him.

The house was like a soap opera. Tenants stole stuff from one another—a TV, a cell phone—and the super, a guy named Albert Sanchez (pseudonym), collected the rent but failed to give it to the landlady, resulting in a charge of grand theft.

The TV was taken by a tenant calling himself John Hughes, who took off and, as far as Murphy knew, was never found. Hughes was also suspected of stealing the license plate from the landlady's Cadillac, which was parked in a locked garage at the residence. He'd stopped by to “get his things.”

The landlady told police that when an apartment owner rents out rooms by the week, she didn't expect to get the best citizens as tenants. Everyone was of sketchy repute.

Barker said that during the first few months of 2004, she rented a room to a suspected cocaine addict who drove on a suspended license.

She didn't compile detailed information on her tenants. Just as long as they paid cash, they were fine with her. She didn't need or want anyone's whole biography.

After Sanchez was incarcerated, his mother came to the rooming house to get his stuff. She found that the door to his room had been pried open and his “entertainment center” was missing.

Police were yet again called to the address when an anonymous informant reported “heroin use” going on in the building. The responding officer found everyone sober, and was told by the Shade Avenue tenants that it sounded to them like mischief from a hostile ex.

Another visit involved a man named Jones, who was overdosing on alcohol and drugs. The man was transported to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. There was no evidence that the man was attempting suicide.

So the landlady had problems, and Murphy wasn't one of them. She thought Murphy was one of the better citizens to pass through. She recalled that the only less-than-perfect thing about Murphy was that he was “grabby.” On a couple of occasions he had inappropriately touched her buttocks. The first time occurred when Murphy complained to her that there was something wrong with the toilet, which was between apartments A and B. When Barker bent over to take a look at the commode, Murphy grabbed her ass from behind. She felt he was somewhat strange, not crazy—a big man with big hands, eager to use them. The touching all occurred when he was brand-new in the house, late December maybe, before the holidays. (Murphy remembered the ass-grabbing incident as well. He said this was during his “touching period,” and added that the landlady didn't seem too put-off by it—which was the impression Barker gave as well.)

The one time the cops did come to the Shade Avenue house about Murphy, Barker recalled, it was about inappropriate touching at work. The landlady correctly assumed that during this period of Murphy's life, he had to work to keep his hands off women. Poor impulse control.

He was always on his bicycle, she later recalled. “Some kind of ten-speed,” she said. He didn't have a car, and she never saw him get in a car.

Murphy showed Barker some of the eating plates he had painted. He gave her one as a gift, but the painting, she thought, was too dark and scary. She kept it on a kitchen shelf, not wanting to throw it away because it was a gift, but not wanting to look at it, either.

Murphy told her that some of his painted plates were on display, on consignment, in Sarasota art galleries, but he was never specific about which ones.

Scott Richards (pseudonym) was another tenant of the Shade Avenue place when Murphy was there. He remembered that Murphy usually wore khaki pants and a collared shirt, usually a button-up style. Richards said Murphy's mode of transportation was a rather nifty “mountain bike.”

Murphy, for his part, had blurred memories of his experiences in the Shade Avenue house. He had other things on his mind. He didn't befriend any neighbors. He did, however, remember a little Spanish guy in the front apartment—Victor, Hector, something. He knew the guy because they shared a bathroom, and each had to make sure the other wasn't already in there before entering.

He remembered that a guy who cleaned carpets for a living had moved in about a week before Murphy left. He just knew him to say hi to. Talked to him for a few minutes, maybe twice.

He remembered a guy named Clive. It was Clive who fixed his toilet when Sanchez wouldn't or couldn't.

The only problem Murphy had with theft involved food. “I had food disappearing all the time. I would put things in the refrigerator and then they'd be gone—mustard, bread. A few times,” Murphy said.

Despite Barker's observations, it seems certain that for the first couple of weeks that Murphy stayed on Shade Avenue, he did have a car. He didn't give the Geo back to Dean until January 8. After that, he rode his nifty bike all over Sarasota—exploring neighborhoods, scouting interesting locations like a movie director—a filmmaker with larceny on his mind.

In his free time he frequently went to the beach, and made many all-day trips to Venice Beach and back. As he pedaled, the voices urging him to rape and kill were almost a constant in his head. He could put his fingers in his ears and shout “la, la, la, la” all he wanted, and it did nothing to drown out those voices. They came through loud and clear, no matter what.

 

 

There were many
almost
incidents. Women were almost hurt on many occasions. But conditions were never just right. Circumstances needed to be just right.

“I knew without a doubt that my opportunity would come soon,” Murphy said. He still thought he was a god, maybe the God, in communication with other gods: Lord Enki. Marduk. Nergal. And, of course, Jesus. He was Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy, dominant to almost everything, but unadulteratedly subservient to the ever-present female voices nagging in his head.