LESS THAN AN hour later, I was sitting in Manning’s office at FBI headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
“There are definite DNA matches with five of the names you gave me,” Manning said. “Likely matches in a half dozen more. The others—all except one—came back with varying degrees of DNA confirmation data, making it possible, but not absolutely certain, they were done by the same person.”
“That includes the murders people have already been sent to jail for?”
“Yes.”
“Which means they must be innocent.”
“It looks like that.”
“Jeez!”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be a major legal nightmare. But that’s not my concern. I just want to catch the son of a bitch who’s been doing this for so long. Now that we know he does exist.”
No serial killer—at least none that I could think of—had ever gone undetected for such a sustained period of time without anyone realizing the deadly predator even existed.
Sure, there had been serial killers who worked in anonymity for shorter periods in the past.
A lot of people don’t know this, but David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, was shooting and killing people in New York City for months before anyone knew about it. Berkowitz’s spree began with the stabbing of two teenaged girls in 1975. After that, Berkowitz began using a gun—the infamous .44 Bulldog revolver—in a series of attacks against women—and sometimes the men with them—throughout 1976 and into early 1977. But they all seemed like separate, random crimes until police matched up the ballistics in all the slayings to find out they came from the same gun. That’s when the terrifying serial killer who would become Son of Sam exploded into the public consciousness. After that, Son of Sam/David Berkowitz went public with his killings, sending taunting notes to the authorities and media about his victims.
Ted Bundy was able to abduct and murder women in secret at the beginning, too, but authorities eventually connected the pattern and linked the various murders to Bundy after a few years of disappearing women—and bodies found later throughout the Northwest.
No question about it though, “The Wanderer”—that’s what I was calling him, too, now—was a different kind of serial killer. A serial killer who had carried out his deadly spree in secret for three decades while no one even knew he was out there. Until now.
“Which one of the murders was the only one that didn’t have any kind of DNA match?” I asked.
“The first one.”
“Becky Bluso in Indiana.”
“That’s right.”
I was surprised.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could Becky Bluso’s murder not be connected to all the rest? The person I got the information about the serial killings from started it all out by looking into the Bluso murder. And it was at the top of the list of victims he put together. It doesn’t make any sense that there’d be no DNA match on her.”
Manning shrugged. “I’m only telling you what the DNA results showed.”
He explained that DNA testing was difficult in such old cases. DNA deteriorated at different rates—depending on a variety of variables—including how it had been stored. In cold cases like this, many of them ignored for years without any arrest, DNA preservation was not a big priority.
“That’s why these cases are less than a perfect DNA match,” he said. “But there’s enough DNA evidence for them to make us believe they are connected. The other five are slam-dunk matches. No question about it. Same person did them. Probably did all of them. Except for Becky Bluso. We got nothing from DNA there.”
“Maybe the DNA match wasn’t there because evidence samples had eroded or whatever after thirty years.”
“Or maybe someone else murdered Bluso, a different killer from whoever did the rest.”
“Then why would her name be at the top of the list of victims?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who came to us with the list.”
He asked me then for more information about how I’d obtained the names. I’d told him some of it in the meeting we’d had in the bar that first night, but he wasn’t that interested in the details then. Now he wanted to know everything.
“Any idea how Barlow came up with the names?” Manning asked when I was finished.
“Only that he was interested in going back to the Bluso girl’s murder—which he had remembered from his days as city editor at the Indiana paper—and that led him to these other dead women.”
“Except the Bluso killing doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of them.”
“As far as we know,” I said.
My mind was racing at a million miles an hour right now. Not only with questions about Bluso and the other dead women. But mostly, how I was going to break this big, blockbuster story. I figured I’d race back to the office, get Maggie and the others to pull together whatever background and old video footage we could find from the other murders, and then I’d report the whole thing myself on the 6 p.m. newscast. Maybe I could even get Manning to go on air with me to talk about these revelations.
But, as it turned out, Manning had other ideas.
“I need you to sit on this story for now and not tell anyone about it,” he told me.
“Are you kidding me? This is a huge story, and I’m the one who discovered it. I came to you, remember? Why wouldn’t I put it on the air tonight?”
“Because right now we know about this serial killer being out there, but he doesn’t know about us. That is, he doesn’t know we know about him. That gives us a big advantage in looking for him. If you air the story, it will jeopardize our investigation. That’s why I’m asking you not to do it.”
“Look, I understand what you’re saying. And I want to be a good citizen and help the FBI and police just like anyone else. But the investigation is your job, not mine. My job is to report the story. And that’s why it’s going on the air on our 6 p.m. newscast tonight.”
“You can’t do that, Clare.”
“How are you going to stop me? I have the same information you have, and you’ve told me now about the DNA matchup results that confirm there’s a serial killer at work. We weren’t off the record or anything when you did that. I’m going with the story.”
“I think there’s a way we can both get what we want out of this.”
“Huh?’
“I have an offer for you.”
“There’s nothing you can offer me that will stop me from airing the story on our newscast tonight.”
“Listen to my offer to you first.”
“There’s no point—”
“Please, Clare.”
“Okay, what’s your offer?”
“I’ll let you inside our investigation.”