Evil Season (32 page)

As autumn approached in 2011, Elton Brutus Murphy was the most polite murderer ever. He never failed to thank the author for the supplies he sent, or for the attention he gave.

“It's been a privilege and an honor working with you. Do you already have another murderer lined up for your next book?” he asked.

The answer was no. The author's next investigation was to be a reexamination of an icy cold case, a double sex murder near the author's home when he was a child.

Murphy said he was doing well. “Considering where I am,” he added, which was the Northwest Florida Reception Center prison facility in Chipley.

Murphy had a reason to feel good. After more than a year in prison, he'd received his first visitor, his seventy-two-year-old aunt, Thelma Prance, from Cartersville, Georgia—his father's sister.

She had not been around much when Murphy was a boy and asked him to fill in the blanks for her. What was her brother—dead now for more than twenty years—like at that time?

Murphy told her that his dad beat his mom and “aspirated on a severe drunk.”

Murphy's time went through a rough patch in 2010 when, after years of taking the same antianxiety, depression, and psychosis drugs, he began to have bad side effects. But eventually his meds were changed and the side effects smoothed out.

Murphy still thought in terms of how much better society would be if he were within it rather than outside it. He could be a teacher. During his life he had taught an amazing three subjects: photography, scuba diving, and hairstyling.

Some people complained of stage fright and dreaded situations where they had to speak in front of groups, but not Murphy.

“I'm comfortable,” Murphy said, “as long as I know the subject matter reasonably well.”

 

 

Murphy thought it was funny, but his best friends in prison were all bank robbers. He'd always been drawn to bank robbers, all the way back to his days in the general population in the Texas jail. All of the bank robbers he'd befriended had one thing in common: the guts to do it.

“When I was free, I was successful at stealing small amounts of money. I never once contemplated robbing a bank,” Murphy said. He recalled a day twelve years past, when he was cutting hair in a Regis shop, and one of his favorite customers came in and told him that her boyfriend just got arrested for robbing a bank. Maybe being a bank robber was a destiny that had gone unfulfilled, Murphy realized with a sigh.

 

 

After a lifetime of being in near-peak physical condition, Murphy, at age fifty-four, was letting himself go for the first time ever. “I simply can't exercise to the extent that I used to,” Murphy said. He injured both of his arms a while back and this hindered his ability to exercise. The guy who once did eighteen hundred push-ups in one day, while in the Leon County Jail, now could do none. When the injury occurred, it felt like the bones in his upper arms had cracked. His arms never healed, never got back to anywhere near what they used to be.

“Now I mainly walk for exercise,” he said.

 

 

Regrets? He had one. He hadn't raised his children in a Christian home. He'd never taught them about Jesus or taken them to church and Sunday school.

Other than that, no, not really. He was satisfied with the way his life had turned out: “I've lived a full life and I've had many unique experiences,” he said happily.

He was thankful that he'd gotten away with so much before he was finally caught and put away. True, he had to pay the piper for going AWOL; but other than that, he'd gotten away with a lot—and without consequences.

Murphy now believed that the seed had been in him for a long time, that he was destined to do something very, very bad—and he had.

“The seed was there, but I didn't nourish it.” But he could only keep Mr. Hyde caged in Dr. Jekyll's psyche for so long. Something had to give. “If I'd nourished it, I probably would have become a serial killer.”

He would admit it now. When he did finally kill, it was such a rush. Big-time thrill. And it stayed in his mind vividly, like a movie that he could play for himself inside his head, again and again.

“After the kill, during my time in the Texas state jail, all I thought about and planned for was my next kill. I was hooked on murder. I was a murder junkie,” he said. “I tried it one time and I was destined to do it again and again, until I was stopped.”

He felt absolutely no remorse for the kill. No guilt! To this day he
still
felt no remorse for the murder and mutilation of Joyce Wishart.

“I do, however, have feelings for the family,” Murphy quickly added. He remembered them in his daily prayers.

“I also have regrets about not putting my own family first when planning the murder.” He hadn't completely thought through the possibility that he could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was sorry for the hardship and pain his act caused Dean, and ex-wife Paula and the kids. “I neglected my own family in pursuit of pleasure,” he said, “even though the murder was a result of my extreme schizophrenic promptings.

“During the act there was extreme pleasure,” he said, but that didn't change the fact that the murder was a manifestation of his “complete psychological breakdown.”

He did feel like there was injustice in his spending his remaining years in prison. What should have happened was he should have been committed to Chattahoochee for a few years, give the shrinks a chance to get his meds right so that sanity returned, and then he'd be good to go.

Murphy knew his own mind better than anyone else would, and he could vouch for the fact that he'd been “normal” since 2008. No hallucinations, no paranoia, no grandiose feelings of being God. All of that was before 2008.

 

 

Prison, however, was his destiny. If nothing else, he'd become a man of routine—a man who lived life at a lackadaisical pace, day after day, week after week, all very much the same.

He woke up at four-thirty in the morning when the lights went on, shaved, brushed his teeth, and prayed for his extended family and others. After prayer he read the Bible, two to four pages, which always offered him pleasure and comfort. On April 18, 2011, he completed reading the entire Bible for the first time. He immediately went back to Genesis and started reading again.

Just like the days, he would repeat.

Sometime between five-thirty and seven in the morning, no set time, he went to breakfast. After that meal they had “first count,” to make sure all inmates were present and accounted for.

After first count Murphy cleaned his cell, every day—took him about fifteen minutes. “Then comes what I like to call ‘my time,'” he said. He usually read, maybe a novel. He read several times throughout the day between the counts and the meals.

Occasionally he had to work. His job was called “inside grounds.” He walked around the grounds and picked up trash. (Ironic, right?) And he pulled weeds. On the days that he worked, he finished up around 2:00
P.M
.

He went to the prison library once a week and picked out three books. Another once-a-week activity was recreation. “All I ever do is walk four miles around a huge dirt track,” Murphy said.

Group Bible-study meetings were twice a week, and lasted about forty-five minutes apiece. Every once in a while he got to go to the chapel for a concert. The most recent concert was by Young Isaac, a coed sextet of college students. They were very good.

“I lead a very quiet, reserved, most-of-the-time peaceful life—considering I'm in prison,” Murphy said, but he added, “There is a lot of noise and sometimes not-so-peaceful things happen around me.”

He said he lived a Christian life, “as much as my personality will allow. And, believe it or not, I am content.”

 

 

His contentment had nothing to do with the quality of the prison he was in. The inmates all claimed that the Northwest Florida Reception Center was the worst prison, and Murphy was inclined to agree. He was more content than the others for the simple reason that, no matter what the situation was, he could make the most of it. That wasn't true of a lot of guys. Take his best friend, for example. He'd been in this prison for about six months. He'd been in plenty of prisons, he said, and this one was the worst. “The prison is really starting to get to him,” Murphy said, “and his mood has been a downward spiral ever since he arrived.”

Murphy liked to play devil's advocate when it came to the worst-prison argument: “At least here, the officers don't carry clubs like they did in Texas,” he would say. In Texas, Murphy had had a cell mate who one day threw water on an officer. A few minutes later the officer returned and took the guy out of the cell. Thirty minutes later, when the water thrower was returned, he'd been severely beaten: big knots on his head, eye and mouth busted open.

Murphy didn't have any groupies, but he wouldn't mind a few. Back when he was in county jail, he'd had four women at once who wanted to be his pen pal. But he was so psychologically screwed up at that point that he couldn't appreciate how much those women could have helped him combat his loneliness. He had refused to write them back. He wished he had that many women who wanted to be pen pals with him now, but no such luck.

 

 

If Hollywood made a movie of his life, who would star in the picture? “Keanu Reeves or Russell Crowe as me,” Murphy said. “Katy Perry could play the girl I almost kidnapped—but she would have to put some blond highlights in her hair. And Demi Moore as Paula, the mother of my children.”

Keanu Reeves was the star of one of Murphy's two favorite movies of all time,
The Matrix.
His other favorite film was
Contact,
with Jodie Foster. Murphy commented, “Both movies provide real escapism from our everyday reality.”

Truth was, TV had become a bore. He'd rather pray or watch a Christian movie. He never watched news that much, and crime news wasn't an interest.

He did, however, admit that—as a “wannabe serial killer”—he did have some knowledge of the serial killers who'd come before him.

“If I had to pick one, the serial killer I find most interesting is Ted Bundy,” Murphy said. “I found him fascinating. The thing wrong with Bundy was he was cruel in the way he killed those women.”

What advice would he give to people who, as he once had, heard voices ordering them to do ugly things?

“If you wake up and find your world seems too surreal, it probably is!” he said. “Seek professional psychological help immediately before it's too late. Even if your intuition tells you that nothing is wrong with you.”

Did he ever get down in the dumps because his days of freedom were forever behind him?

“They've taken away my freedom, but they can't stop my dreams,” he said—and at night, asleep in his cell, he dreamed of those sixty acres behind his house when he was a kid, the ill-fated orange grove and the dense woods, and how he wandered for hours, alone and free.

 

 

Murphy remained a reader in prison. Beggars couldn't be choosers, for sure, and he'd readjust about any crap. But every once in a while, he would read a book that struck him as pretty good. He recently enjoyed
The Last Juror
by John Grisham,
Digital Fortress
by Dan Brown, and Tom Clancy's
Shadow Warriors.

Noting that the author of this book had previously coauthored a book about submarines, Murphy explained that one of his favorite books of all time was
U.S.S. Seawolf
by Patrick Robinson.

As a kid he loved books about boys who visited faraway planets in rocket ships that they built themselves, but as an adult Murphy read almost exclusively nonfiction. He loved books about the military or scuba diving, or how-to books. It wasn't until his incarceration that he read his first novels for grownups. He enjoyed mysteries.

He enjoyed a photographer's autobiography. Surprisingly, he enjoyed the “Christ Clone” trilogy, by American novelist James BeauSeigneur, about the end of days. He didn't think he was going to like it because he assumed it was anti-Jesus, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that it was done with skill and brought the New Testament to life. He would recommend those books to Christians and atheists alike.

He had never been a big James Patterson fan.
You read one; you've read them all,
he thought—until he read
The Murder of King Tut.
It blew his mind. He could hardly believe Patterson wrote it.

But his favorite book was the Bible—and his favorite book of the Bible was the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans. “The theme of Romans is the gospel,” Murphy said. “That is the Good News, that salvation from sin is available through Jesus Christ. Romans teaches us how to deal with our sinful attitudes and behaviors and how to get back on the right track. I have turned my life and will over to God so he can transform me into the godly person he wants me to be.”

Maybe. A better bet is that Elton Brutus Murphy, a unique fiend and ghoul, has a special spot reserved for him in the deepest, hottest ring of hell.

Karen Fraivillig said she hoped she would never have to work on a prosecution team on a case as disturbing as this one again, but unfortunately that was not the case.

On January 17, 2008—on a dim, drizzly day in North Port, Florida—an unemployed loser named Michael King abducted a young mother of two named Denise Amber Lee. He took her to his home, where he repeatedly raped and sodomized her, drove her into a desolate area, put a single bullet through her head, and buried her in a shallow grave.

Fraivillig, again teamed up with Lon Arend and Suzanne O'Donnell, prosecuted the case. There were familiar faces on the other side of the aisle at the King trial as well: Carolyn Schlemmer and Jerry Meisner were defending King.

King's defense team claimed that a childhood sledding incident had left King with a damaged frontal brain lobe, which resulted in him being criminally insane. King was convicted on August 28, 2009, and now resides on Florida's death row.

That case became the subject of this author's book
A Killer's Touch.

 

 

In March 2010, Judge Andrew Owens, after many years of dedication to the First Step program—which helped provide substance-abuse rehabilitation and counseling to pregnant women—was honored as the “Caring Heart of the Year.” Judge Owens, who presided over many of Elton Murphy's first court hearings, founded the “Drug Court” programs in Sarasota and Manatee Counties in 1997, which each year led to the substance-abuse treatment and counseling of three hundred individuals.

 

 

In 2011, Michelle Andersen, of Admiral Travel on North Palm, said it was funny the author should call, because she'd been talking to someone about Joyce Wishart just the other day. There were still enough old-timers on the block, and they remembered.

After all this time, it could still come up twice in a row. On that strip of storefronts, many things changed the day of the murder, many of which never switched back. Women were no longer alone at work. Never. No one worked at night.

In the years since the murder, the travel agency Andersen worked for changed spaces and was closer than ever to the crime site.

The Provenance Gallery was now a beauty salon. She was friends with the new proprietors and considered them friends, but she still couldn't enter that building without thinking about what had happened there. Andersen went into the salon only a few days before and had talked with the owner. He asked Andersen if she was around at the time of the unpleasantness. Andersen said, “Oh yeah.” He asked that she keep it quiet. He didn't want his clientele thinking his parlor was a haunted house.

Just as it had been before, that end of Palm Avenue was still the quieter part, although a new modern parking garage had increased pedestrian traffic, and additional streetlights meant it was no longer the darker end of the street. A lot of money had been pumped into sprucing that stretch, creating a modern, seemingly safer nocturnal vibe.

The turnover, life's turnover, was always under way, and several of the businesses from Joyce Wishart's day were gone, new businesses in their place. That was just a normal symptom of the tough times everyone had been going through for the past few years. Maybe, after enough time passed, the block could be completely renewed, and doors again could be left open.

The people who remember still do it in their own way, largely alone, and life goes on.

 

 

Sally A. Trout, whose interior design firm was only two doors away from the Provenance Gallery, said she had been changed forever by the murder. She still found the subject hard to think about, even though years had passed. She couldn't walk past “that space” without being overwhelmed by creepiness.

She shivered every time.

It wasn't the fault of the people who operated that space now, of course, but that kind of bad energy
stayed.
Then again, maybe she had it wrong. Maybe traumatized people carried the bad energy inside them, and it wasn't at the crime scene at all. The people who went there now, and didn't know what had occurred there, couldn't feel it. But Trout could feel it—because she remembered.

Her office still had a “panic button,” in case she and her workers were ever accosted by an intruder—a security measure that would have seemed bizarre during the innocent days before the murder. She still supplied her largely female staff with Mace so they could feel safer going to and from their cars at the bookends of each day. She had a retail office in a different location now, but it remained policy that no one was allowed to work alone.

Marcia Corbino, the Sarasota art historian, completed a second fictionalized version of Wishart's murder and Murphy's trial. As of March 2011, she was having the work edited in hopes of getting it published.

Bob Ardren, the writer for
Sarasota Magazine
who volunteered a DNA sample during the days after Wishart's murder, died at age sixty-seven of cancer on January 1, 2008.

Reedy Photoprocess, which employed Murphy for six months back in the early 1980s, made a tough but efficient transition to digital photography. There came a time when all equipment had to be thrown away and replaced with new equipment, but the business survived. The location in Pasadena where Murphy worked was sold many years ago and is currently a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post.

 

 

Murphy's brother Dean and his wife Alane still operate the Boat in the Moat Restaurant near Solomon's Castle.

Elton Murphy bragged, “My brother also books all the tours of the thousands of people who visit Solomon's Castle yearly.”

 

 

As it turns out, in the twenty-first century, Murphy's delusions regarding the SEALs police—squads of avengers seeking out those who falsely claimed to be SEALs—turned out to be not so far off the mark.

There was in reality a small band of veterans and civilian volunteers scattered across the country who
have
dedicated their existence to exposing phony ex-SEALs.

The problem, barely a blip until 2011, became an epidemic after a Navy SEAL killed Osama bin Laden. All of a sudden every con artist in the country was adding the SEALs to their résumés.

One guy, Steve Robinson, a former SEAL from Forsyth, Missouri, even wrote a book called
No Guts, No Glory: Unmasking Navy Seal Imposters.