MARTY HAD BEEN working on two different stories at the same time.
He’d started out investigating the building corruption story in New York. But then, for some reason, he’d become interested in the old Becky Bluso murder case from when he was a young journalist in Indiana. Whatever he uncovered led him to the serial killer idea. This was the only scenario that made sense.
Except it didn’t really make sense.
First off, Marty had violated a basic rule of journalism, one he taught me and other young reporters. That rule was: “Work on one story at a time. Finish that story before you start another one. Otherwise, you’ll do a half-ass job on each one and wind up with no story at all.” I can’t count how many times Marty lectured me about that, both while I was working for him and even afterward. And yet, in the middle of working the New York City corruption scandal story, Marty switched gears and began chasing a serial killer story.
Also, how had Marty found out about all these murders? He was an old retired—or almost retired—newspaperman living in New York City. Okay, he probably stumbled onto the corruption scandal because of his son-in-law’s presumed involvement in whatever was going on with Terri Hartwell’s office and all the rest. And then began looking into the long-ago Becky Bluso murder because of his past newspaper connection covering it. But the rest of the murders were in totally different locations and no one had ever put the pieces together the way he was doing over a thirty-year-period. Why Marty? And why now?
Were these two stories—the city building corruption and the murder victims—somehow connected in a way I couldn’t see? Was it possible Marty thought his son-in-law, Thomas Wincott, was the serial killer he called The Wanderer? That seemed unlikely to me. What about someone else in the corruption story? Chad Enright? No, Enright was only in his thirties. He’d have been like five years old when the killings on that list started. Was there something—or someone—else in the picture that I was missing?
Then there was the biggest question of all.
Was any of this serial killer stuff even true?
Or was Marty just a crazy old man at the end?
So desperate to prove he still mattered in today’s fast-changing world of journalism that he created an imaginary serial killer?
I returned to the pictures of the twenty women murder victims on the computer screen in front of me.
The picture of Becky Bluso was at the top. It was larger than the pictures of the other women. Maybe that’s because Bluso meant more to Marty because she had been his first big crime story. Or maybe because he believed she was the first victim. Or maybe some combination of the two.
Underneath the pictures of each victim were their name, the date and place they were killed, and some details about the murder.
I read through the information about all of the murders, looking for an obvious pattern. I found none. The murder sites jumped back and forth all over the country. The method of murder was not consistent. Many victims had been stabbed. But a few had died after being been strangled or from a blow to the head. The killer never used a gun, but that was the only thing exactly the same in all of the murders.
Even the physical characteristics of the victims varied. Some were brunette, some blond, one was a redhead—and their ages varied from seventeen—Becky Bluso—to the twenties and late thirties. Most serial killers have a “type” of woman they target. But apparently not this one.
There was another problem, too.
I picked up the phone and made a few calls to local media and law enforcement agencies and discovered that several of the murders on the list had already been solved or were close to being solved. Which meant they weren’t the work of a serial killer, just individual murders committed randomly by different suspects in various locations over the years.
If they didn’t fit the pattern, why had Marty put them on his list?
I went back to Marty’s files again. In them, he had included a lot of other material about serial killers.
There was a series of quotes from Ted Bundy, collected over the years. I read some of them now: “I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet”; “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere”; “What’s one less person on the face of the earth anyway?” and—perhaps his most chilling quote of all—“Murder is not about lust and it’s not about violence. It’s about possession. When you feel the last breath of life coming out of the woman, you look into her eyes. At that point, it’s being God.”
There were more quotes collected from other infamous serial killers over the years. From Son of Sam: “I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I didn’t want to hurt them, I just wanted to kill them.” From Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker: “I love to kill people … love all that blood.” From the Zodiac Killer: “I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is much more fun than hunting wild game in the forest.”
Scary stuff all right.
Marty also explained a bit more about why he had come up with the name “The Wanderer” for the serial killer he believed was out there. He wrote:
“This man has been carrying out murder after murder quietly—over a period of years and in many states and cities and locations around the country—without anyone noticing the connections between all these killings. I don’t know this person’s identity yet. But, when I was a young man, I always remember that song from Dion called ‘The Wanderer.’ All about someone chasing pretty girls all over the country, never staying long in one place—but moving on after each girl. ‘I roam around, around, around …’ the refrain goes. It seems particularly appropriate now.”
I looked back at the pictures of the twenty young women again. Victims—or possible victims—of “The Wanderer.”
Was a single person responsible for all these deaths?
Or even some of them?
And was The Wanderer—if he even existed—still out there targeting more women for death?
I didn’t have the answers to these questions.
But I knew what I had to do to go looking for them.
Follow another important rule Marty taught me a long time ago about how to cover a complex or confusing story.
Start at the beginning.
The beginning of this story was Becky Bluso.