The May Day Murders (2 page)

But the Smithtown Police Department was
very small—only fifteen officers and patrolmen in total—and they
needed Roger Hagstrom badly enough to overlook his shortcomings.
Besides that, Roger Hagstrom was second in command, so they more or
less had to. His only superior, Chief Frank Thompson, admired and
respected Roger’s skills as a detective and tolerated his tardiness
and occasional inebriation on the job up to a point; his only
stipulation being that Roger not make the chief’s special leniency
toward him public knowledge.

Sam often tagged along with Roger on
his assignments. It wasn’t a particularly unusual situation—cops
and journalists frequently worked closely together to a degree,
especially in a little town like Smithtown. What made Sam and
Roger’s relationship unique was the way in which they complemented
each other. They were a good team and often aided one another in
achieving their respective goals.

Besides the benefits attained from
their working relationship, Sam had another reason for occasionally
joining forces with his friend: it was interesting as hell. Murder
cases were few and far between in Smithtown, but there were plenty
of other crimes going on all the time: dope deals gone bad,
burglaries, armed robberies, bar stabbings and shootings. A pretty
lively town for its size, crime-wise. The faltering economy seemed
to have a lot to do with it.

Sam pulled into the parking lot of the
Observer
and shut off the ignition. The parking lot was as
desolate as he’d suspected it would be; the
Observer
had no
Sunday paper and everyone had already cleared out for the day. He
got out and walked over to the side entrance of the massive stone
columned building and entered. He turned right and made a beeline
through the ornate lobby to the elevator and pressed the button for
the third floor.

When he reached his floor, Sam strode
past the reception desk to the editorial offices. His office was
located at the far end on the left, near the coffee machine. He
cued up a pot on the Bun-O-Matic and checked to be sure that there
was some milk in the tiny refrigerator beside it before entering
his office and switching on the overhead lights.

Sam stepped over to the window behind
his desk and opened the blinds, staring out at the view outside.
Directly below him he could see downtown Smithtown; five square
blocks or so of dead or dying businesses that were slowly but
surely being strangled by the slumping economy. Further north,
beyond the railroad tracks, was the Hilltop section of town where
the majority of Smithtown’s less unfortunate resided. It sprawled
either way for a few miles, bounded by the Scioto River to the west
and a range of foothills to the east. It was early October and
autumn was already making its debut in southern Ohio. The trees
were flecked in bright shades of reds and yellows, making the view
even more impressive than usual. In another week or two, Sam
thought, the hills would look as though they were on fire as fall
peaked-out.

Sam turned around, rolled his swivel
chair out from under his desk and sat down. The large oak desk was
in its usual disarray, littered with files, sections of last week’s
papers and no fewer than three used coffee mugs strewn randomly
around a black plastic ashtray in bad need of emptying. He tidied
up the papers a bit and carried the dirty coffee mugs out to the
sink by the coffee machine. When he returned, Sam switched on the
computer, located the police file on Marsha Bradley in a drawer and
pulled out its contents.

Sam felt a cold chill run down his
spine as he stared incredulously at the eight-by-ten glossy
photograph on top. It was an image of Marsha Bradley lying nude on
her living room floor, face-up, her eyes frozen in a hideous
expression of terror. A narrow red welt running across the width of
her neck where she had been strangled to death was crisply rendered
in the photo, as were her breasts with the words “May Day”—one word
per breast—meticulously inscribed in red lipstick by her murderer.
And, as if all of this wasn’t appalling enough, Marsha’s assailant
had then proceeded to cram the lipstick vial into her vagina; its
end barely visible between her splayed legs.

The autopsy performed on Marsha’s body
had determined that this final gruesome act had been performed
after her assailant had strangled her to death. No weapon had been
found at the scene, but the coroner’s hunch was that Marsha had
most likely been strangled with a lamp cord or similar object.
Prior to her murder, the victim had been raped and sodomized, and
her assailant’s semen and hair samples had been sent to a lab,
pending analysis.

Sam laid the photograph aside and
studied the police report. The victim, Marsha Lynn Bradley, nee
Stilson, had been a white female, 5’6”, 118 pounds, brown eyes,
thirty-nine years old. Her husband, Doctor David Lee Bradley, had
discovered her body on the night of October 8, at 9:47 P.M. The
victim’s son, Tommy, age five, had been present in the house when
the body was discovered, locked in his bedroom closet. The child
had been in a state of severe shock and literally unable to speak
when police arrived at the scene. There had been no signs of
physical trauma to the child.

Preliminary investigation revealed no
apparent signs of forced entry and nothing had been stolen. Odder
still was the fact that there had been no signs of a struggle at
the scene. The entire house had been searched and dusted for
fingerprints and it was later determined that none of the prints
found belonged to anyone other than the victim, her immediate
family and Mary Willis, the housekeeper. The lipstick vial was
confirmed to have belonged to the victim. No usable prints had been
found on it.

The victim’s husband had been
questioned. Doctor David Bradley had reportedly been at a friend’s
house, Matt Timmonds, helping him install drywall in his garage.
David Bradley had left his house at around six-thirty P.M, shortly
after dinner, and had remained at the Timmonds’ residence until he
had returned home and discovered his wife’s body. Bradley’s alibi
was corroborated after an interrogation of Matt Timmonds. David
Bradley, at least at this point of the case, was not being
considered a suspect in the murder.

Sam glanced down at the right-hand
margin near the bottom of the report and saw Roger Hagstrom’s
barely legible scrawl: “No clues, no leads.” He could almost read
his friend’s frustration in the bold pen strokes.

Sam had been out of town the night that
Marsha had been murdered. He’d driven to Huntington, West Virginia
to interview a disc jockey that worked at one of the town’s rock
radio stations for an article regarding the recent format change of
Smithtown’s only radio station from rock to country music. When he
arrived back in Smithtown shortly after midnight, Sam had played
back the message Roger had left on his answering machine advising
him to get in touch with him ASAP—that something “really big” had
happened. Sam had promptly called the police department to learn
that Roger was at the Bradley home investigating a murder. Sam had
arrived at the Bradley’s just as they were wheeling Marsha’s body
out.

Roger Hagstrom had been sober and in
rare form when Sam had gotten there. He’d never seen his friend as
exasperated and stressed-out over a case in all the time he’d known
him. Roger had later confided that he felt particularly uneasy
about the murder and that he had a gut feeling that Marsha’s
assailant was going to be tough to nab. Besides the fact that the
police had so little to go on, his bet was that the murderer wasn’t
a local man. He based this on what he already knew about Marsha
Bradley. She had been an extraordinarily friendly, easy-going woman
who was well-liked by everyone in town who had known her, and odds
were that she had no enemies capable of disliking her enough to
commit such a heinous assault. Her rape and murder, in fact,
appeared to have been premeditated—well thought out in advance and
executed without a hitch. Of course, Roger had gone on to say,
someone local may have done it—nothing was impossible—but the odds
were stacked against this. He conceded that until there was some
kind of motive established, the murderer could theoretically have
been just about anyone.

There were a couple of other things
that had bothered Roger as well. One was the message the assailant
had left on her body. ”May Day.” God only knew what it meant, he’d
told Sam, but it implied something that he hoped wasn’t the case
here. A serial killing. It was often standard M.O. for a serial
killer to leave either an object or a message of some kind behind
for the police and the rest of the world to try and figure out. It
was all part of the “psyche” of a deranged, cold-blooded murderer,
Roger explained, to challenge the public, as if to say, “Well, now
that I’ve done this, what the fuck are you gonna do about it? I’ll
even make it easy for you—all you have to do is figure out this…”

And another thing was bugging Roger.
The fact that there had been no signs of forced entry and no signs
of a struggle prior to or during Marsha’s rape and murder. No signs
of trauma whatsoever were visible on her body other than the welt
on her neck. This almost suggested that Marsha Bradley might have
known her assailant, perhaps even intimately, and that she’d
trusted him enough to allow him into her home. This was the most
unsettling aspect of the whole case, Roger had declared. If Marsha
Bradley had indeed known her assailant intimately, it posed a
number of disturbing and “touchy” questions that needed to be asked
and answered.

Sam set the report down and went out to
the coffee machine. After pouring himself a mug and adding a shot
of milk he returned to his desk. He took a sip of the steaming
brew, lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply, staring pensively at
the blinking cursor on the computer monitor.

Sam was no detective by any stretch of
the imagination, but there was one thing that wasn’t quite jibing
in Roger’s theory of Marsha Bradley’s murder case. If it indeed
turned out to be that Marsha had known her murderer, then why was
Roger still so bent on thinking that he hadn’t been a local man? It
would seem most likely that he had been, and that Marsha had been
having an extramarital affair with him, as unfathomable as that may
be. Had the murderer been an absolute stranger who just happened to
have blown in from out of town, Marsha would most certainly have
given her assailant one hell of a struggle during the rape, one
would assume. Unless of course she had been either drugged or
unconscious during the act, neither of which being the case. The
autopsy had shown no signs of drugs in her system and only a slight
trace of alcohol. Dave Bradley had told the police that his wife
had drank a glass of white wine with her dinner that
evening.

Sam had brought this up to Roger the
day before, and Roger had reiterated that his theory was by no
means ironclad, and that he wasn’t by any means ruling out the
possibility that Marsha Bradley’s assailant had been a local man.
But Roger had then countered Sam by asking him what he thought the
odds were of Marsha Bradley having an affair in Smithtown, Ohio and
not a single person ever having known about it, or even suspecting
it. Sam had had to agree that it was nearly impossible to
conceive—considering the little town’s penchant for gossip and
flinging rumors around like there was no tomorrow. Never once had
anyone ever breathed so much as a shred of gossip that Marsha
Bradley might be having an affair with anyone, period. Her and
David’s marriage had been that seemingly rock-solid.

Roger had gone on to say that there was
really only one thing he was absolutely sure of, regarding the
murder case. Marsha Bradley’s assailant was as clever as he was
demented. He had somehow managed to pull the entire thing off
without leaving any trails whatsoever. Not one of the neighbors
questioned had seen anyone enter or leave the Bradley house on the
night of the murder. Nor had they seen or heard anything unusual
that night; no strange cars parked in the vicinity, no dogs
barking, nothing. It was becoming more and more apparent that the
only person living who might possibly have seen the murderer was
little five-year old Tommy Bradley.

Roger told Sam that Tommy Bradley was
probably their only hope. He had to have seen or heard something
that night. After all, there was little doubt that it was the perp
who had locked the youngster up in the closet. The big problem was
the fact that nobody could interrogate Tommy until the psychiatrist
gave them the green light; and that could be weeks, maybe even
months. In the meantime, the murderer’s trail was only going to get
colder and colder.

Smithtown Police Chief Thompson had
decided it best to keep fairly tight-lipped about the case for the
time being as far as the public was concerned. Sam wasn’t permitted
to report any of the details concerning the murder, other than the
fact that Marsha Bradley had been sexually assaulted prior to being
murdered by strangulation. Not a thing was to be mentioned about
the message left on her body, the possibility that it might have
been a serial killing, nor that the only concrete evidence found so
far had been nominal forensic evidence. There was no need to get
the entire town in a panic that there might be a serial killer on
the prowl, the chief had contended. Thus, until something broke in
the case, the
Observer
was to portray Marsha Bradley’s rape
and murder as little more than an “unfortunate loss to the
community” and blatant testimony to the “extreme violence in
today’s society.”