Six
July 5, 1998
With a smile on his face, Neal asked Suzanne Scott to remove her glasses. When she complied, albeit reluctantly, he tied a piece of bath towel around her eyes as a blindfold. “Can you see?” he asked the twenty-one-year-old woman.
If she looked down, Scott could see the floor of the garage at her feet. She was getting nervous about where this dress rehearsal for her roommate’s “surprise” was headed and decided that the blindfold attempt was good enough. “No,” she answered, “I can’t see.”
Neal placed a strip of duct tape across her mouth. It was uncomfortable but not painful. Still, she wished he’d hurry and get his playacting over with.
She knew Neal through her roommate, Beth Weeks, a woman she’d met at work. Weeks was thirty-five years old, divorced with three kids, and struggling to make ends meet. They had became close friends and often went out together.
One of their hangouts after work, and sometimes even during lunch, was a dark, smoky bar called Shipwreck’s. That was where she first saw and heard about a guy named Wild Bill Cody Neal. Weeks and some of her other coworkers knew him from the bar, where he could often be found starting at noon until closing most any day of the week. He was a character who enjoyed playing the role of a cowboy. He was always in a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, blue jeans, and if the weather was colder, he donned a black duster. But she had never actually talked to him until late 1997, about the same time she and Weeks became roommates.
Weeks wanted her to double-date with Weeks’s boyfriend, Jimmy Gerloff, and Neal. Scott wasn’t real thrilled about the idea; Neal was quite a bit older and a little strange, but with a lot of persuading, she at last agreed to go.
Neal called and asked her to meet him at the Sheraton Hotel at Sixth and Union. She was to let the front desk know that she was with him and his party. “They’ll take good care of you,” he said in that low, rumbling voice of his.
Weeks and Gerloff were already there when she arrived, but Neal didn’t join them right away. Still, Scott had to admit that the guy seemed to have some pull. Everyone on the hotel staff was very nice and accommodating, making sure she had whatever she wanted in drinks and food. He finally showed up and escorted them up to a floor in the hotel that he’d rented out for the evening’s party. She quickly discovered the reason behind the staff’s attentiveness as Neal tipped lavishly.
By early 1998, Weeks and Gerloff had split up, and Weeks began seeing more of Neal. Scott began to learn more about Neal, and how he seemed to relish cloaking himself in mystery. Some regulars at Shipwreck’s said he was a bounty hunter; others hinted that he might have once been a hit man for the mob.
Neal never told the women exactly where he lived. He said he split a lot of his time between Denver and Las Vegas, where he apparently had a home. He even showed them photographs of a mansion, which he kept in a white three-ring binder with sheet protectors. But he said he wouldn’t stay there until his little girl, whom he was trying to win custody of from her wicked mother, could stay there with him.
As far as Scott could tell, Neal seemed to have another girlfriend, a woman named Angela Fite. One night he called and asked Weeks and Scott to come see him and “Angie” down at a swank south Denver restaurant. “We’ll have a drink to celebrate Scott’s birthday,” he insisted.
They only stayed for one drink, but Scott left with the impression that Neal and Fite were intimate. Still, after the meeting at the restaurant, Weeks and Neal seemed to be together all of the time. Weeks confided that she was really starting to care for him.
Scott had to admit that Neal could be a lot of fun and that she benefited from his largesse as Weeks’s roommate. He liked going out in limousines and threw money around without a care in the world. He would never allow anyone else to pay when they went out, whether it was dinner or the extravagant tips he insisted on giving the restaurant staff.
A night or so before her birthday, shortly after meeting Fite, Scott was asleep in her room when she heard Neal and Weeks enter through the front door of the apartment. A few minutes later, Weeks knocked and walked into her room. “Cody wants to know if he can come wish you a happy birthday,” Weeks said.
“OK,” Scott answered sleepily, wondering what this was all about.
Neal came in and began tossing dollar bills onto her bed, $100 in all. “We’ll use some of this when we go out to celebrate your birthday,” he said. The gesture surprised her. She didn’t really think of him as being a close friend, but later, Weeks shrugged and said that it was just an example of Cody’s generous nature.
Around mid-June, Neal started talking to Scott about having “a surprise” that he was planning to give Weeks. He’d talked often about helping Weeks with her financial situation before, saying he was thinking about buying her a new car or helping with some of her expenses. This was different, he said; this was going to be a big surprise.
When she brought up the conversation later with Weeks, her roommate happily confided that he’d told her that he was buying her a home. She wasn’t sure whether that also meant he intended to live with her, though he’d said something about wanting to keep some of his things there.
Neal said he also wanted to help Scott out. He asked her to work for him in “his” mortgage-lending business. He was talking about a lot of money, a lot more than she was making at her present job, and it involved some travel between Las Vegas and Colorado, which sounded like it could be fun.
Still, Scott had a hard time believing him. It just seemed too good to be true. But he kept insisting that it was, and then said he wanted her to go with him to Las Vegas. His lawyers, it seemed, were insisting that they meet her before she was offered the job. He said they would be gone for two nights, but she balked; she didn’t tell him, but she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of spending that many nights in his company in a city that she didn’t know. He was Weeks’s boyfriend, and it just didn’t seem right. When she said that she couldn’t go for that long, he changed his mind and said they could go for a quick trip, overnight and be back the next afternoon.
Scott decided she could at least go to Las Vegas and see if the offer was on the up-and-up. It was settled then, he said he would pick her up Sunday evening, July 5, and they’d come back Monday. He said there was just one other thing. He didn’t want her to mention his offer to anybody, including Weeks.
The last request seemed odd. Scott broke down and told Weeks. Her roommate was puzzled that Neal hadn’t said anything. “Do you think he can be trusted?” Scott asked. They talked about it for a little bit; then Weeks answered, “I don’t think he’d ever do anything to hurt one of us.”
Two days before the trip, Friday, July 3, Weeks called Scott at work and said that Neal had made plans for the three of them to go out. She said she thought he might be taking them up to Central City, a former mining town in the mountains west of Denver that had legalized gambling casinos in 1991. “Get home as fast as you can after work,” she said, “and get ready to go out. He says it’s going to be a big night.”
When Scott got home from work, Weeks was already there. She showed off several new outfits that Neal had bought her that afternoon during one of his famous shopping sprees. Weeks handed Scott a skirt. “Cody wants you to wear this,” she said. Caught up in Weeks’s excitement, Scott accepted the skirt.
The night began as a mystery. Cody had given Weeks specific instructions. After they got ready to go, the women were to walk across the street to a pizza joint. He would meet them there. The women did as told and had been waiting about ten minutes when Neal showed up about 7:00 P.M. The odd thing was that they didn’t see him pull into the parking lot. He just walked up. He explained that his truck had a flat; he was getting it fixed at the tire store down the block.
As though frustrated, Neal said they might as well order a pizza and eat while they were waiting. He ordered and then, to Scott’s astonishment, dropped to one knee and proposed marriage to Weeks. Her roommate giggled and told him yes. He then presented her with what certainly looked like a diamond ring.
Scott was still trying to comprehend what had just happened, when Neal popped up again and said that he needed to run to a nearby liquor store. When he was gone, she turned to Weeks. “I didn’t know you guys were that serious,” she said.
Weeks laughed. “It was just a joke,” she said. She looked at the ring and frowned; it certainly looked real. But no, it was just a joke, she concluded again.
A few minutes later, Neal was back with several small airline bottles of alcohol. He invited the women outside to celebrate his betrothal and royal “proposal” to Weeks. He was dressed in his omnipresent black cowboy hat, black duster, and cowboy boots, but he’d eschewed the usual black T-shirt for a western-style dress shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons.
Neal was in a grand mood indeed, laughing and carrying on, talking about what a great time they were going to have that night. Rebecca Holberton had been dead and wrapped in black plastic for more than three days. He’d split Candace Walters’s head open only eight hours earlier. But he was full of life when a white stretch limousine pulled up. Neal explained that this was another joke; they weren’t taking his truck tonight—they were going in Wild Bill Cody style.
With Neal directing, they first went to two bars—Fugglies, where he went in with the women for a drink, and Shipwreck’s, where, without explaining why, he stayed outside. Then it was off for the night’s biggest surprise. He was taking them to dinner at the Diamond Cabaret, a “gentleman’s club”—a restaurant and lounge on one side and a topless dancing bar on the other.
They went in the restaurant side and were seated immediately. Neal ordered rum and Coke while the women ordered beer. He, of course, picked up the dinner tab and drinks. He paid in cash, of which he had plenty, having gone to an ATM machine with Walters’s debit card and removed $400. He’d already taken nearly $1,000 out of Holberton’s account.
After dinner the two women went into the bathroom. While there, a woman approached, asking for Scott by name. When she identified herself, the woman said, “Cody wants you to follow me.” Going along, they were led into the topless dancing section of the club. Neal was already there, sitting in front of one of the small stages where the dancers performed. He directed them to two seats and paid two dancers to strip in front of his two dates.
They didn’t stay long. When the dance was over, Neal said it was time to leave. He handed Weeks and Scott handfuls of dollar bills and instructed them to put the money on another stage where a woman was dancing. The dancer smiled at him as though they knew each other.
Back in the limo, Neal said they could choose the next bar. The women decided on The Stampede, the country-western bar that Neal had frequented since back in the days when he was married to Tate. At the bar, they were joined at their table by several younger men, all trying to figure out if one of the two women with Neal was available.
Wild Bill Cody was in his element, lecturing the younger bucks on how to behave like a proper gentleman. “Stand up when a lady comes back to sit down,” he told them when Scott returned from the rest room.
“A lady shouldn’t have to light her own cigarettes,” he said another time when they didn’t react quickly enough when Weeks brought one to her lips. He, of course, had his lighter ready.
Toward the end of the night, Weeks and one of the young men got into a drunken disagreement about some trivial matter until Neal stepped between them. “You need to be polite to this woman,” he growled. Though bigger than Neal, the other man backed down.
They got home about 3:00 A.M., and Neal spent what remained of the night with Weeks. Scott didn’t see him there in the morning, but he and Weeks and her roommate’s youngest daughter were all at the apartment that afternoon when she left to spend the Fourth of July with other friends.
Scott was back at the apartment on Sunday, July 5, to get ready for her trip to Las Vegas with Neal. She dressed in conservative business attire—a peach blouse and navy blue slacks. She’d packed another business outfit for the following day.
Neal picked her up about 7:00 P.M. When she got in the car, he said they were running a little early and that he wanted to stop for a drink at Fugglies. In the bar, he told her that before they left for Las Vegas, he wanted to show her the big surprise he had for Weeks and he hoped she’d be willing to go through a “dress rehearsal” for the event. They went back out to his car and soon arrived at a brown town house on West Chenango Drive.
The garage had an automatic opener, which Neal activated so that he could pull in and then immediately shut the door. That’s when he said he wanted to blindfold her and put duct tape across her mouth. “That’s how I’m going to have Beth do it,” he explained.
Scott didn’t want to do what he asked, but she assumed that the town house was the surprise that Beth had hoped for—a home of her own—so she went along with it for her friend. After blindfolding and muffling her, Neal had her take his arm as he led her through the garage and up the steps into the townhome. Inside, he picked up his cat, which he introduced to Scott, having her pet the feline’s fur. He then led her down a hallway. Something was wrong. For one thing, there was no carpeting in the hallways, just bare plywood. She surmised that perhaps the home was being remodeled and the project was not quite complete.
Guiding her across the room, Neal brought her to a point where he told her to turn around and sit down. The seat was farther down than she had figured and she quickly realized that she was sitting on a mattress. He told her to lie back. She didn’t want to, but now she was becoming afraid. She did as told but began to cry when he grabbed her wrists and then her ankles and tied each at a corner of the bed. She was spread-eagled, blindfolded, and badly frightened.
Neal seemed to have changed. Gone was the warm, friendly guy who was going to get her a great job and buy her roommate a new home. He told her to shut up and quit crying. “You haven’t seen me get cold and mean,” he warned, “and you don’t want to.”
She felt him fumbling at the buttons of her blouse until he had it open. There was a shock when she felt cold steel against her chest as he slipped a knife beneath the front of her bra and cut it off with a single stroke. He used the knife to slice her pants off her body and then her underwear.
“Do you want to die?” he asked her, pulling off the duct tape.
“No,” she cried from fear.
“Then do as you’re told,” he said. “Just stay calm and stop crying.”
Scott did her best to control her tears. She thought that she was about to be raped, but Neal suddenly stopped what he was doing and asked her a question. “Have you ever seen a human skull?” he asked.
“No,” she said, not wanting to, either. She heard him get up and cross the room. A minute later he was back, removing her blindfold. He clutched something in a piece of paper. Delicately, as though it might break, he pulled an object from the paper. It was a bloody piece of bone with hair still attached. “You see that?” he asked, and placed it on her bare belly.
Neal left the piece of skull on her stomach for a minute, watching her reaction, before picking it up and tossing it over onto a large object wrapped in black plastic that she could see to her left. He’d been crouching at her side, but now he stood and walked past a chair at the end of the mattress and over to the fireplace. By lifting her head, she could see that he was standing by another large object that was covered with a blanket. He reached beneath the blanket, and to her horror, he lifted a woman’s leg up. He let it fall back to the floor with a thud.
Next he walked over to the object in black plastic. It was another body, he said, and gave it a hard kick. All the while, he studied her face, looking for something.
Scott was sure that she was going to die. Why else would he show her what he had done and then let her live?
Neal came back to sit at her side, placing duct tape over her mouth again. He fondled her breasts and groped at her legs. Again she thought it was the prelude to rape, but he stood and said that he had to leave to get someone else.
“You better not make a sound,” he warned. He had colleagues upstairs who would remain there so long as she was quiet. “If they come down, they won’t be as nice to you as me.” He said they’d rape and then kill her.
Neal covered her from head to toe with a blanket. Then he left her there in the dark, thinking of the horror that surrounded her, and believing that he was telling the truth about “the others” upstairs. She concentrated on the country-music station that he’d left on the television for her entertainment, counting two music videos and two commercial breaks before she heard the garage door opening again.