Eye of the Beholder (7 page)

“Until he developed a fixation on Ellie Danzinger,” Lightner said. “That’s where he met Ellie, right? And Cassie Bentley? In this class of yours.”

Albany nodded. “Obviously, I didn’t have the slightest idea that anything like
this
—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

“Tell me about Cassie Bentley,” Riley said.

The professor pinched the bridge of his nose. “A sweet girl. Very sensitive. Moody. Unable to trust people. But very sweet inside.” He took a breath. “I know she’d had some attendance problems. She had them in
my
class, too.”

“Paint me a picture,” Riley requested.

“A picture.” Albany looked up. “Quiet. Shy. Very polite and respectful, always. Lost, maybe.” He nodded his head.
“Lost
is the word. I know some people thought she was anorexic. She’d go through spells where she didn’t go to class, didn’t eat—sort of locked everybody out. Even Ellie, her roommate.”

“What about recently?”

“Recently?” Albany tapped his fingers on the table. “Recently. Yes, I’d heard that she was doing that kind of thing. I mean, I didn’t have her this semester in class, but I did run into Ellie not very long ago—right before finals—and she said Cassie was ‘up to her old tricks,’ I think she said. Not leaving her room. Not even studying. More of the same, really. It seemed like a roller coaster with Cassie. Up, down, up, down. Recently was down.”

Joel Lightner asked, “You keep in touch with Cassie, personally?”

The professor shrugged. “It’s a small campus. I’d see her. But she’s ‘Cassie Bentley,’ you understand. Everyone knows about her. I think that explains, more than anything, why she was so private. You won’t find five people that knew her well.”

“How about one?”

“One? Ellie Danzinger,” he said with no trace of irony. “I know Cassie had a cousin who came into town sometimes. She’d fly in and fly out. You know, life of the rich and famous. I can’t help you beyond that.”

Lightner deflated. But Riley figured this was a dead end, anyway. Harland Bentley had had a point, in the office earlier today—Cassie Bentley’s emotional problems hadn’t gotten her killed.

He wanted to get back to the real cause of Cassie’s death. “We have some reason to believe there’s a religious aspect to these murders,” he said. “The Bible, in particular. Do you teach anything about that?”

Albany gave a faint nod. “Actually, with regard to this song—Tyler Skye gave an interview where he justified the depictions of violence by what was in the Bible. It was, I think, his way of shooting back at critics.”

Riley took the list of biblical verses and slid it across the table. Albany picked it up and read them. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “These are the verses. Oh, Jesus.” He hooded his eyes with a hand. “Did Terry think—oh, God.” He looked up at them. “Look, I don’t teach that the Bible tells us to kill women like this. I’m simply showing that the attitudes against women are well rooted in our history. Tyler, himself, made that point. It’s just a class, guys. Oh, my God.”

He dumped his cigarette into an empty Coke can. “I take it, this is how Terry killed those girls? In accordance with these lyrics?”

The chief nodded at Albany. “You tell us.”

“Well, surely you don‘t—” A look of fear spread across his face. “Listen, it’s all over television.” He placed a hand on his chest. “You can’t think
I’m
responsible for this.”

Riley didn’t think so, but there’d be time for that.

Riley nodded toward the list of verses he’d put in front of Albany. “The last murder,” Riley said. “Burgos wrote down something from Leviticus, then crossed it out and wrote in something from Deuteronomy.”

Albany took a moment to recover, then looked over the list and slowly nodded. “Tyler Skye had cited Leviticus as the justification for that murder. Death to those who commit adultery.”

“What about Deuteronomy?”

Albany shook his head. “I don’t know. Tyler Skye didn’t mention Deuteronomy here. What does that passage say?”

Riley told him—it mentioned the stoning of a whore.

But Albany didn’t know. “Tyler didn’t cite that. Stoning? No, that’s not what Tyler meant.”

“Right,” Riley agreed. “ ‘Stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily.’ He’s not talking about stoning. He’s talking about shooting someone. And he said that came from Leviticus?”

Albany nodded. “Leviticus doesn’t mention shooting per se, of course. Just death to those who commit adultery. But Skye definitely meant the use of a gun. We know that because of what Tyler Skye did, ultimately.”

Riley stared at him. Albany clearly held the room’s attention.

The professor cleared his throat. “About a year ago, Tyler Skye killed himself. He shot himself in the mouth.”

“Apparently, his girlfriend left him because of his infidelity.”

The others in the room reacted with appropriate disdain. But Riley was focused. Tyler Skye, purportedly justifying his lyrics through the Leviticus passage, had committed suicide, following the lyrics to the letter—putting the gun
between those teeth,
meaning his teeth.

But Burgos hadn’t followed that example. He had beaten Cassie with a stone, or some similar object, and introduced a new passage from Deuteronomy to justify it. And
then
he had fired the bullet in
her
mouth—but had not turned the gun on himself.

He hadn’t been faithful to the lyrics. It was a positive development, no doubt, for the prosecution. But it also raised a question.

Why? Why had Burgos decided to improvise, to introduce a new biblical passage never cited by Tyler Skye or suggested by his lyrics?

“Can’t say I’m sorry to see Mr. Skye go,” Chief Clark muttered.

“Well, maybe you should be,” Albany replied. “Torcher has sold twice as many records since Skye’s death. Now,” he added ominously, “he’s a legend. He has a cult following.”

“How many people we talking about?” Chief Clark asked, his eyes downcast. “How many psychos we got running around here, waiting to act out these lyrics?”

“I would say Torcher has thousands of listeners. Not
tens
of thousands.”

Paul frowned, not at Albany’s estimation, but at the chief’s acknowledgment in his question. He was suggesting what was inescapable now: Terry Burgos had been following the lyrics to a song, or at least pretending to. And he’d matched the lyrics to verses in the Bible.

Terry Burgos killed those girls because God told him to.

He could envision the defense now. Burgos was going to claim that the lyrics were preaching God’s word—burning and beating and torturing young women for various sins. He had interpreted these asinine song lyrics as a coded directive from the Almighty Himself. Tyler Skye, in his twisted way, had mimicked biblical passages, and Burgos had taken them as literal direction.

That would be a problem. It made the job more difficult. It would be a nice, simple story for the jury to understand, without fancy terminology like
psychosis
and
sociopathology.
The guy thought the song was a call to him and he acted on it. He must be crazy. Could you imagine anyone doing this who
wasn’t
insane?

They worked on Albany for a while longer. But Paul was no longer listening. There was no doubt that Terry Burgos committed the crimes. The evidence, less than a day into it, was overwhelming, and he’d more or less admitted it. This was no longer about guilt. This was about insanity. If the state still used the modified ALI definition of insanity, then Burgos had to prove two things: that he was suffering from a mental defect at the time he committed the killings, and that he didn’t understand that he was committing a crime.

But Paul knew, already, that he could find discrepancies between these acts and the lyrics of the songs. That would be key to showing that, if Burgos thought he was following the word of God—or the word of the prophet Tyler Skye—he hadn’t done a very good job. He already had more than one discrepancy—Burgos had introduced a new biblical passage and he hadn’t killed himself, like he was supposed to. And Burgos had engaged in sexual intercourse with each of the women—the prostitutes before their death, the students postmortem—and there was nothing in the Bible about
that.
He had committed these crimes during summer break, before the start of summer school, understanding that once summer school started the bodies would be found. He knew, in other words, that what he was doing was a crime, so he was doing it quickly before someone would find the bodies. They also knew that the four prostitutes had worked different parts of the city, which suggested that Burgos was smart enough not to return to the same place. Again, this demonstrated his appreciation that he was breaking the law, and not wanting to get caught.

And Paul was just getting started. By the time this went to trial, he’d punch enough holes in Burgos’s conformity to the lyrics, and to the Bible, to sink a ship. And he’d have plenty of evidence to show that Burgos knew that what he was doing was illegal.

Professor Albany was in tears a half hour later. Paul didn’t blame the guy for what happened, but he didn’t have the time or energy to care. There was only one person he cared about now, only one person he would care about for the next nine months.

Terry Burgos, he was sure, didn’t stand a chance.

Being parents was everything to us. Everything that was good and true in our life centered around Cassie. This man—this monster—has taken away our life. He has taken our daughter, our dreams, everything that a parent has.

—Harland Bentley, in a statement to the Daily Watch, June 29, 1989

This man deserves what his victims received. This man deserves death.

—First Assistant County Attorney Paul Riley, in closing arguments during the sentencing phase of the trial of
People v. Terrance Demetrius Burgos,
May 31, 1990

With the abandonment of his habeus petition before the circuit court of appeals today, Terry Burgos is poised to become the twelfth person to be executed in this state since the reinstatement of capital punishment.

—Daily Watch,
October 19, 1996

MARYMOUNT PENITENTIARY, half an hour to midnight. The prison stands isolated in the countryside, ten acres of land bordered by cast-iron gates twenty feet high, topped with several coils of razor wire. The prison is monitored twenty-four hours a day by correctional officers from an access road that surrounds the facility. The manicured lawns, filled with weight—sensitive motion sensors, are swept with spotlights from watchtowers on each flank of the octagonal building in the center that houses the inmates. Someone tried to escape last year but didn’t even make it to the gate. A sharpshooter blew his knee off from two hundred yards.

A mile out, I pull up to the gate, which looks like something medieval, a thick door with the name of the prison etched in a Gothic font. I lower the car window and feel the thick, steamy air outside, filled with the faint shouts of protesters nearby.

“Okay, Mr. Riley” The guard hands me two passes for Building J, one to hang from my rearview mirror and one for my shirt. “Drive slow,” he adds, motioning to the long paved road ahead. “One of ‘em threw himself in front of a car.”

I drive slowly, as advised, on a narrow road made narrower by media trucks lined along one side. Up ahead, near the mammoth front gate of the facility, I see the two camps, neatly divided by the road and by two dozen county sheriff’s officers in full riot gear. The east side of the divide is for the abolitionists, about a hundred strong, people gathered in circles in candlelight vigil, ministers and priests praying, others marching in a large square carrying signs, like picketers at a labor rally. A young man with a ponytail stands on a makeshift platform of wooden crates, shouting through a bullhorn. “Why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” he cries, to the excitement of his supporters.

The other side is a much smaller group, people who support capital punishment—especially for Terry Burgos. A banner, set up on poles, bears the names of all six victims of Burgos’s murder spree. The reason this group is smaller is that they’re winning the debate, nationwide, and especially here. We like to execute people in this state.

An officer checks my windshield for authorization, then makes me roll down the window and show him my credentials again. The noise from the protesters is almost deafening through the open window, dueling bullhorns and chants. The guard checks my name against his list on a clipboard. “Okay, Mr. Riley,” he says. “Get through this gate and they’ll direct you in.” The guard signals to someone and the gates slowly part.