The Stranger Beside Me (40 page)

beside the bed.

Allen cut off her nightgown, searching for some injury that had caused her condition. He saw pronounced swelling around her jaw, a condition usually produced by strangulation, and an injury on her right shoulder, an ugly purpling bruise. Her right nipple had been bitten almost off. There was no time to dwell on the horror of what had happened; Allen and Roberts inserted an airway into the girl's trachea, forcing oxygen into her lungs so that, to the lay observer, it seemed that she was actually breathing on her own as her breasts rose and fell rhythmically. They inserted a catheter needle into her vein and started a solution of D3W to keep the vein open preparatory to the administration of drugs. They were on standing orders to follow all these procedures in the case of a patient near death. Next, they called the emergency room doctor on standby via radio-telemetry for drug orders. They administered drugs that might start her heart beating for ten to twenty minutes. It was hopeless and they knew it, but the girl who lay motionless on the floor before them was so young. They never got a pulse; all they elicited was a slight, irregular pattern on their heart monitortlt was only electrical-mechanical-disassociation, the electrical impulses of a dying heart. Lisa Levy's heart itself never b^|it at all. Lisa Levy was dead.

Still, she was transported to the hospital with sirens wailing. She would be pronounced D.O.A.

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Melanie Nelson was still asleep in her room. She wakened suddenly as she saw a man beside her bed, a man shaking her and calling her name. She heard him breathe, "My God! We have another one." But Ray Crew was relieved to see that Melanie was not dead; she'd only been sleeping. She sat up and followed him out into the hall, grabbing a coat against the chill of the early morning.

Melanie didn't know what had happened. She saw her sorority sisters huddled together in one room, saw the policemen and paramedics milling about, and assumed that the house was on fire. She asked, "Is everyone home?"

And the answer came. "Everyone but Margaret." Melanie shook her head. "No. Margaret's home. I talked to her." She grabbed Officer Newkirk's arm and said, "Come on, I'll show you." The two walked down the hall to room number 9. The door was ajar now, although Melanie distinctly remembered shutting it when she'd left Margaret after saying goodnight forty-five minutes earlier. She pushed the door a little and could see Margaret's figure in the bed; there was just enough light from the streetlight outside the window so that she could recognize Margaret's long dark hair on the white pillow.

"See," Melanie said. "I told you she was home." Newkirk stepped into the hall, turned on the light. What he saw made him push Melanie into the hall, and shut the door firmly. He felt as if he were walking through a nightmare.

Margaret Bowman lay on her face, the covers pulled up around her neck, but he'd seen the blood on her pillow. Moving closer, he could see the red liquid that had welled up on the right side of her head and clotted in her ear. Oh God, he could actually see into her brain; her skull had been shattered.

Newkirk pulled the bedspread down a little. A nylon stocking had been cinched so cruelly around her neck that the neck appeared to be half its normal size, and was probably broken.

Almost without thinking, he touched her right shoulder, lifted her a bit off the bed. But he knew she was dead, that nothing more could be done for her. He let go of her shoulder and placed her gently back in the position he'd found her in.

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Newkirk looked around the room. There was bark everywhere-on the bed, caught in the girl's hair, glued to her face by blood. And yet, there seemed to have been no struggle at all. Margaret Bowman still wore a shortie yellow nightgown, and a gold necklace was caught up in the stocking around her neck. Her panties, however, lay on the floor at the end of the bed.

Newkirk sealed off the room after paramedic Garry Matthews confirmed that Margaret was dead, and had been for some time. The post mortem lividity that begins soon after death, the purplish red striations that mark a body's nether side, pooled blood no longer pumped by a living heart, was already apparent.

Newkirk notified Tallahassee Police headquarters that there was a confirmed "Signal 7," a dead body at the Chi Omega House. The terrible toll now stood at two dead, two critically injured, but the rest of the sorority girls were safe, all gathered in number 2, shocked, weeping, unbelieving. How could they have slept through such mayhem? How was it possible that a killer could enter their sleeping area so easily without anyone knowing?

It had to have happened with such rapidity as to be unimaginable. Melanie Nelson had seen Margaret Bowman alive and happy at 2:35, and Nita Neary had seen the man with the club leaving at 3:00 A.M. Melanie had gone back and forth across the hall until 2:45 A.M.!

One of the coeds who huddled, shivering, in number 2 was Carol Johnston. Carol had come home about 2:55, parked her car behind the Chi O House, and entered through the back door. Like Nita would moments later, Carol found the door ajar. She went through the foyer and up the front stairs. When she reached the second floor hall, she was somewhat surprised to see that all the lights were off-a most unusual occurrence. The only light at all was from a desklamp her roommate always left on when Carol was out, and it made just a slice of lighl under her door. Carol had changed into her pajamas and made her way down the black hall to the bathroom. The door to the bathroom is a swinging door. As Carol stood inside, brushing her teeth, the bathroom door creaked, something it invariably did when someone passed by in the hall just outside. Carol had thought nothing of it, assuming it was one of the 272

other girls. A moment later, she emerged and walked down the hall, guided by the light from her room.

Carol Johnston had gone to bed, unaware that she had missed the killer by no more than a fraction of a second.

The man in the dark knitted cap may have entered the Chi Omega House earlier in the evening, may have waited until he thought all the girls were in and asleep, or he may have entered through the unlocked rear door after 2:00 A.M. Some investigators feel that Lisa Levy was attacked first, and her killer waited in her room for other victims to come home. It is more likely that Margaret Bowman was the first victim, Lisa the second, and Kathy and Karen almost afterthoughts. If that is true, the man, in the grip of compulsive, maniacal frenzy, moved through the Chi Omega House second floor with his oaken club, killing and bludgeoning his victims-all within a space of less than fifteen minutes! And all within earshot of almost three dozen witnesses, witnesses who didn't even hear him.

Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were now lying in the morgue of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, awaiting post mortem examinations early Sunday morning. The area around the Chi Omega House, indeed the whole campus, was alive with patrol cars and detectives' cars from the Tallahassee Police Department, the Leon County Sheriffs Office, and the Florida State University Police Department, all looking for the man in the dark jacket and light trousers. They had no idea what he looked like-no hair color, no facial description beyond the fact that he'd had a large, sharp nose. It was unlikely that he still carried the bloodied oak club. It was likely that he might have bloodstains on his clothing; there had been so much blood let in that catastrophic fifteen minutes as he ravaged the four sleeping girls.

In the Chi O House itself, room numbers 4, 8 and 9 were littered with the debris left by both the killer and the paramedics, the walls sprayed with droplets of scarlet, the floors and beds full of blood and bits of bark from the death weapon. Officer Oscar Brannon went to the rec room, and, on his hands and knees, collected eight pieces of the same bark on the floor of that room; entry had obviously been made through the back door where the lock had been nonfunctional. He found a pile of oak logs in the back yard of the soror-

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ity house. It appeared that the killer had picked up his weapon on the way in.

Brannon and Sergeant Howard Winkler dusted for latent prints in all the rooms-doorways, wall posters, around the combination lock that had failed. They took photographs. In Margaret Bowman's room, Brannon noticed a Hanes "Alive" stocking package lying across the wastepaper basketempty-only the cardboard and cellophane remaining. A new pair of pantyhose lay on her roommate's bed. It seemed that the killer had brought his own garottes with him.

A BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) bulletin was quickly in the hands of every officer in Tallahassee and Leon County.

There had been no pictures taken of Lisa Levy in her room; she had been rushed to the hospital in the vain hope that some spark of life remained, but Tallahassee I.D. Officer Bruce Johnson bad taken photographs of Margaret as she lay on her bed, her face pressed into her pillow, her right arm straight down beside her body, her left arm, hand palm up, bent over her back, her legs straight. No, Margaret had not fought her murderer at all. It had been the same with Lisa; she had been found with her right arm beneath her.

Sheriff Ken Katsaris of Leon County was there, Captain lack Poitinger, Chief of Detectives, and Detective Don Patchen of the Tallahassee Police Department. In fact, there wasn't a lawman in all of Leon County who was not aware of what had happened within an hour after the mass slaughter. Not one of them had ever had to deal with anything like the savage violence they were faced with.

Patrol officers fanned out through the neighborhood in door-to-door canvass. Nothing. A surveillance van parked on the street stopped everyone who passed by. Nothing. The suspect was simply gone. The paramedics had delivered the victims, alive and dead, to the hospital, and were back on the street shortly after 4:00 A.M. Their night's wdtk was far from over.

The old frame duplex at 431 Dunwoody Street was approximately eight blocks from the Chi Omega House, closer as the crow flies. Two-tenths of a mile. It was typical of many of the twenties vintage structures bordering the campus proper which had been turned into rental housing-nothing fancy, but adequate. There were two "shotgun" apartments at

431 Dunwoody. Debbie Ciccarelli and Nancy Young lived in 274

A, and Cheryl Thomas lived in B. Each apartment opened onto a common screened front porch with a single door, but the duplexes had separate entries-entries leading into a living room, a bedroom, and, in the rear, a kitchen. They shared a central wall and when the place had been remodeled into two units, nobody had been much concerned with insulation against noise.

That didn't matter in the least to the three girls who lived at Dunwoody Street; they were close friends. Cheryl and Nancy were both dance majors and had once been dorm roommates on campus. The trio visited back and forth and often went out together socially.

On Saturday night, January 14th, the three girls-and Cheryl's date, a dance student--had gone dancing at Big Daddy's, another popular spot for young people in Tallahassee. Cheryl and her date had left before closing and as Cheryl had a car and her date didn't, she had driven him home, arriving about 1:00 A.M. He served her tea and cookies and they talked for about half an hour. Then she drove the two miles to the Dunwoody duplex and was in her apartment by two. She flipped on the television set, walked to the kitchen and made herself something to eat, fed her new kitten.

Within minutes of her arrival home, Nancy and Debbie drove up. They shouted at her, complaining good-naturedly that her TV was too loud; she laughed, and turned it down.

Cheryl Thomas is a tall, lithe girl with the body of a ballerina, dark-eyed, with long dark hair falling to the middle of her back, dimpled, pretty, somewhat shy. She glanced around the neat kitchen with its red-and-white print curtains and tablecloth, and turned out the overhead light, leaving just a nightlight on.

Cheryl waited for her kitten to follow her, and then closed the accordion-pleated divider separating the kitchen from her bedroom. She changed into panties and a sweater-it was a chilly night-and then pulled back the blue madras spread on her bed, a bed that was just on the other side of the wall from the bedroom of her friends next door. She was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Something roused her a short time later-a noise, something falling?

She listened for a moment, and then decided it must have been the kitten. Her window sills were full of plants and the cat liked to play there. There were no more sounds, and she turned over and went back to sleep.

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Next door, Debbie and Nancy had also settled down for the night. To the best of their recollection, they were asleep by 3:00 A.M. Debbie woke from her sound sleep around 4:00. She sat up, listened. It sounded as though there was someone beneath the house with a hammer, banging again and again. Debbie slept on a mattress on the floor and felt it as the whole house seemed to reverberate from the thumping sound that came from some place just beneath her bed or the wall between her bed and Cheryl's.

Debbie shook Nancy awake. The sounds continued for about ten seconds, and then it was quiet again. The two girls in A waited, trying to identify the noises Debbie had heard. They were afraid.

Then they heard new sounds, sounds coming from Cheryl's apartment. She was moaning, whimpering, as if in the grip of a bad dream. Debbie crept to the phone and called her boyfriend, asking him what they should do. He told her just to go back to sleep, that everything was probably fine. But Debbie had a gut feeling; something was terribly wrong.

The three girls had long since established a security check. They were always to answer their phone-no matter what time of day or night. Nancy and Debbie huddled together and dialed Cheryl's number. They could hear her phone ring once .. . twice .. . three times ... four ... five.... No one answered.

"O.K. That's it," Nancy said. "Call the police ... now/" Debbie reached the Tallahassee Police dispatcher at 4:37 A.M. and gave their address. As she was doing this, a terrible crashing noise came from Cheryl's apartment, a noise that seemed to emanate from her kitchen, as if someone was running, banging into the kitchen table, the cabinets. And then there was only silence.