Chapter 15
We got back to the bar just after eleven and since the place was closed, we had it to ourselves. I offered to make Mal some lunch but he wasn’t hungry enough for an entire meal. So instead I suggested an appetizer and slipped into the kitchen to fire up the deep fryer and make us a batch of fried cheese curds.
“I never had these until I came here,” Mal said a short time later as we sat at the bar munching on our curds.
“They’re a Wisconsin specialty,” I said. “Do you know how to tell if they’re fresh?”
Mal shook his head, his mouth full of cheese curd.
“They squeak,” I told him. “When you bite into a fresh cheese curd, it should squeak when the curd hits your teeth. It’s an interesting experience for me because I can taste both the cheese curd and the squeak. For a long time I thought the squeak was my own unique experience, a synesthetic response to the taste. But then I heard others describe it and realized it’s a genuine phenomenon.”
Mal looked at me suspiciously. I think he thought I was trying to put one over on him so I told him to sit tight and went into the kitchen to get a fresh, unfried cheese curd. “Go ahead, try it,” I said handing it to him on a napkin. “I’ll be quiet while you bite into it and listen.”
Still looking skeptical, he took the curd, eyed it as if he thought I might be feeding him something rancid, and then slowly took a bite. I heard the squeak, and from the way Mal’s eyebrows arched, I knew he had, too.
“See?” I said with a self-satisfied, righteous smile. “Told ya.”
“Can you hear my squeak, or is the sound in one’s head?”
I took the remainder of the curd from him, leaned in close, and said, “Listen.” Then I bit down into the curd, creating an audible squeak.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mal said. “Who knew?”
“Most Wisconsinites,” I said. “If you want to stay here for any length of time, you’re going to have to learn your cheese stuff. It’s Wisconsin state law.”
He smiled at that. “As long as I’m not required to wear one of those foam cheese wedges on my head, I’m fine with learning more about cheeses.”
“There’s a fabulous deli not far from here that has an amazing array of local cheeses. We should go there some day and do a sampling.”
“I’d like that.”
Once again we found ourselves sharing a moment that felt comfortable and fun one second and awkward the next. This time we were saved by a knock at the front door, though it was more of a pounding actually. We both turned to look and I saw Tyrese peeking in and waving at us through the window in the door. I waved back to let him know we saw him, and then Mal and I grabbed our coats and went outside to greet him.
Tyrese owned a Toyota Highlander, which was double parked in front of the bar. Mal sat up front with Tyrese, giving me the backseat all to myself. As Tyrese pulled out, we gave him a summary of our visit to Erik Hermann’s house.
When we were done, Tyrese picked up a folder he had beside him and handed it to Mal saying, “I did a little research on Lonnie Carlisle. Take a look if you like.”
Mal opened the folder, scanned the first sheet, and then handed it back to me. It was a rap sheet that showed Lonnie Carlisle’s conviction for statutory rape and a couple of DUIs. There were some other offenses as well but they were minor: loitering, trespassing, panhandling . . . typical convictions for someone who was homeless.
“Are you going to get into trouble for showing us this stuff?” I asked Tyrese.
“The arrest records are a matter of public record. You could dig it up on your own if you wanted to. You might find some additional info in there, however, and I’d appreciate you not sharing it with anyone else or saying where you saw it.”
“My lips are sealed,” I said.
Tyrese nodded and looked over at Mal, who was busy reading whatever was next in the folder.
“Mal won’t say anything, either. Will you, Mal?” I said.
He looked up, said, “Of course not,” and then went back to reading.
After another minute or two, Mal handed me the second section from the folder. It was several pages stapled together, slightly faded, and dated nearly twenty years ago. It was a narrative summary, typed up by the arresting officer, of the statutory rape charge against Lonnie Carlisle. It stated that Lonnie, who was eighteen at the time, had had sex with a minor girl and that the girl’s parents had filed a complaint. The report was written in an objective and unemotional manner until the very end. Then the arresting officer went into an explanation about how upset the victim was over the charges her parents had brought against Lonnie, arguing that the sex had been consensual and the two of them were in love. I got a sense from the wording that the officer had sided with Lonnie on some level and felt the charges were unfair, though there was nothing in the report that explicitly said that.
On the next page there was an addendum to the report written some months later. It noted that the victim had committed suicide by overdosing on a handful of sleeping pills and narcotics, prescriptions the girl’s mother had for her severe, crippling arthritis.
Mal handed me another collection of stapled pages that highlighted Lonnie’s attempted murder and sexual assault charges from an incident that happened in the summer following Lori’s and Anna’s murders. The names of the girls who were involved in this incident had been blacked out in the report, and when I mentioned that, Tyrese offered up an explanation.
“Sometimes with minors, the names are excluded, obliterated, or a fake name might be used to protect their identity. The press can get ahold of some of these reports and while some reporters are good about not naming minors, others have no such qualms. Plus one of the girls in this case was the daughter of a prominent local judge at the time.”
I read through the report, which included the statement of the girl who had escaped more or less unscathed, the results of the physical examinations of both girls and Lonnie, and a description of some evidence found at the scene. The unscathed girl’s physical exam was negative other than some bruises on her arms and some scratches on her legs that were determined to be from running through brush when she escaped. The other girl’s exam showed similar leg scratches but it also revealed a huge depression fracture of her skull with bleeding in the brain as a result.
Lonnie had multiple bruises on his body—on his legs, his arms, his head, and his back—most of which he said were incurred when the girls kicked and threw rocks at him.
The statement from the girl who escaped said that Lonnie had jumped out of the woods and scared the girls when they were riding their bikes along a path in the park where the incident occurred. It forced them to stop, and then Lonnie reportedly lunged for the girl who ended up with the brain injury, stating that he wanted to “feel her boobies” and have her “stick your hand in my pants.” There was a struggle, and the girl making the statement said she tried to help her friend get away, but after Lonnie shoved the first girl to the ground, smashing her head on a rock, he then grabbed the second girl and started “feeling me up.” When the cop asked the girl what that meant, she stated that Lonnie stuck his hand up her shirt and tried to undo her pants.
The unscathed girl said she managed to escape and get back on her bike to go for help. By the time the cops arrived on the scene, Lonnie was gone. They found the wounded girl still lying where she’d been when her friend went for help, and a rock nearby that had her blood and hair on it.
There was no actual evidence of sexual assault on either of the girls, although the shirt of the one who had escaped was torn, and the snap and zipper on the shorts of the girl who had been wounded had been undone. Also noted was the fact that this event took place in the same general area near the Little Menomonee River and the Oak Leaf Trail where Anna’s and Lori’s bodies had been found.
Lonnie was apprehended a few hours later and his statement was the polar opposite of the girl’s. He claimed that the two girls found him sitting on the ground dozing at the base of a tree. The next thing he knew, he was getting kicked. He tried to defend himself, and finally managed to get to his feet and start backing away. He begged the girls to stop, but they started throwing rocks at him so he turned and ran. He claimed he never touched either girl except perhaps in an attempt to ward off their kicks, and that both girls were fine when he left. When asked how the one girl came to be so gravely injured, he claimed not to know.
It wasn’t hard to see why Lonnie had been convicted, particularly if one of the girls had been, as Tyrese said, the daughter of a prominent judge. Clearly, Lonnie was a disturbed man and a prime candidate for the murder of the other two girls.
I said as much to the two men in the car. “What I don’t understand is why they didn’t try to pin Anna’s and Lori’s murders on him,” I concluded.
“Lack of evidence,” both men said at the same time, and I saw Tyrese shoot Mal a curious look.
Mal held up the last of the papers from the folder and said, “At least that’s what this report says.”
This seemed to satisfy Tyrese, who nodded and turned his attention back to the drive.
Mal didn’t hand me the next group of papers; he summarized them for me instead. They were reports from the examinations of Lori’s and Anna’s bodies.
“Both girls’ bodies had been in the water, trapped under the frozen ice for a little over two months. Their bikes were found in the river, too, though the one Anna rode actually belonged to her brother. Hers had a flat tire and was still at the house so she apparently borrowed her brother’s. The water washed away a lot of potential evidence, but the fact that the water was so cold did preserve the bodies. There were no hairs or body fluids found on either girl, and only Lori showed evidence of sexual assault in that she was naked from the waist down and there was bruising and tearing in and around her vagina. There was also bruising on both girls’ necks indicating they were strangled, and the clothesline that was used to do this was still around their necks and tied around heavy stones. While the weight of the bikes and the stones might have kept the bodies under the water for a while, there was enough early . . .” Here Mal paused, bit his lip, and thought for a moment. Then he looked at me. “Basically the bodies would have eventually surfaced due to gas formation,” he said with a wince.
I nodded both my understanding of what he meant and his reluctance to relay the grim information, so he went on.
“The rope was eventually traced to a clothesline in the backyard of a house in a neighborhood several blocks away that bordered the park area where the bike trail and the bodies were located. It appeared to have been cut with some sort of sharp object.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Were they able to tell?”
Tyrese glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Darn good question, Mack. You really are starting to think like a cop.”
Mal said, “It says the ends of the clothesline were frayed and the person writing the report felt that it had been cut, or gnawed at, with a pair of ordinary household or office scissors.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but before I could get a word out, Mal said, “And to answer your next question, no, there were no scissors found at the scene or anywhere nearby.”
“Did the cops find scissors like the ones described in any of the suspects’ houses?” I asked.
Tyrese smiled at me again and Mal looked to him for an answer to this one. Apparently, that information wasn’t in the papers he still held.
“They did,” Tyrese said. “Scissors were taken into evidence from Lonnie’s house, William Schneider’s house, Tim Johnson’s house, and the Gruber home. None of them produced any usable evidence and they couldn’t be connected to the crime, nor could they be ruled out. However, no scissors of any kind were found in the Hermann house even though Mrs. Hermann swore she had a pair on her office desk. She wasn’t able to explain why she couldn’t find them.”
“Wow,” I said arching my eyebrows in surprise. “That doesn’t look good for Erik, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Tyrese agreed.
“We really should try to talk to him again,” I said. “I hope his wife can convince him.”
Tyrese and Mal both nodded their agreement.
That was the end of the papers in the folder and a short time later we arrived at the prison. We checked in at the outer gate and once we were inside the compound, we parked and then Tyrese led the way to the front entrance, where we had to pass through another guarded gate before we were allowed inside the main building. The place had the smell of institution all over it—at least for me—and faded, chipped concrete walls that were painted avocado green. We checked in at yet another gated station, where we all had to offer ID to a guard sitting behind a glass enclosure that sat alongside a barred, floor-to-ceiling wall with a gate. There were two guards inside the enclosure, and the one sitting up front near the check-in spot sported a name pin that said R. DINKLE. Behind him was a series of monitors that showed various areas in and around the prison, and these were being watched by the second guard, who had his back to us. I wondered if the glass of the enclosure was bulletproof. Something about it was different from ordinary glass because when I looked through it, I got a whiff of an acrid chemical scent that faded as soon as I looked away.
Dinkle asked Tyrese who Mal and I were, and why we were along for the ride.
“They’re involved with the case I’m investigating,” Tyrese said vaguely.
Dinkle frowned, clearly not liking this answer, but he didn’t pursue the matter. Instead he slid a clipboard toward us through a slot in the glass and told us to sign in after asking to see our IDs yet again.
Once this process was done he said, “The prisoner has asked his lawyer to sit in on your meeting. The lawyer’s name is Philip Longhorn and he’s already in the room. If you follow Karl here, he’ll take you there.”
With that, the second guard stood, exited the enclosure, and came toward us, stopping on the other side of the gate in the barred wall. Dinkle pressed a button and the gate slid open. We followed Karl, who, according to his badge had the last name Houston, down a short hallway, hearing the echo of the barred gate we’d just come through bang closed behind us. It was a scary, creepy sound that made me feel a little claustrophobic. At the end of the hallway we stopped in front of a large metal door that Karl had to unlock. There was a window in the upper third of the door, but it was mesh-filled and triggered the same odd chemical smell the glass in the enclosure had. We all stepped through into yet another hallway, this one much bigger. Along the sides of this hallway were four more windowed doors—two on each side. We waited while Karl relocked the door we had just come through before following him to the last door on the left, which was located near a fifth door at the end of the hallway. The fifth door was windowed also, and beyond it I could see a long open space bordered by prison cells on both sides.
Karl unlocked and opened the door to the room we were entering. “Longhorn is inside,” he said in a bored, monotonic voice. “We weren’t expecting three of you so someone will have to stand. Once you are in the room, the prisoner will be brought in. This door will be locked behind you but if you need anything, I’ll be standing out here. Just knock on the door.”
I couldn’t help but notice how the guards depersonalized the men by referring to them as prisoners rather than using their names. On the one hand it bothered me, but then I rationalized the behavior when I remembered that some of the men in here had done some horrible, heinous things, and as such, they probably seemed less than human to those who had to deal with them day after day.
“We’ll be fine,” Tyrese said. He opened the door and we all paraded into the room.
It was a bare-walled, windowless, cinder block structure with a scarred wooden table at the center. There were two chairs on the side closest to us and one on the far side. The door behind us closed with a loud thunk and I heard the scrape of the lock being reengaged. I suppressed a shiver and grimaced as I tasted something like dirty potato peels, though I wasn’t sure which sound had triggered it, the thunk or the scrape of the lock.
Philip Longhorn sat with his back to us but he glanced at us as we approached the table. He appeared surprisingly young; he barely looked old enough to drink. He eyed us with suspicion as Mal pulled out the one remaining chair on the closest side of the table and indicated for me to take it. I did so and smiled at Longhorn, who didn’t smile back. Tyrese made the introductions and Longhorn returned the favor by muttering his name. He had an air of disdain about him that gave me the feeling he thought we should simply know who he was, or that he didn’t care if we knew.
“May I ask why you want to speak to my client?” he asked Tyrese.
“We’re looking into a cold case from twelve years ago, two young girls who were murdered.”
“Ah, the Gruber-Hermann case?”
Tyrese nodded.
“The cops tried to pin that crime on my client back when it happened, but it was dropped due to a lack of evidence. Do you have something new to offer?”
“No,” Tyrese said. “We’re interested in talking to all of the parties who were, or might have been involved back then. Just recovering old ground to see if anything new turns up.”
Longhorn narrowed his eyes at Tyrese for a few seconds, then glanced at Mal, and finally settled his gaze on me. “Are all of you cops?”
I answered after deciding to stick with the story we’d been using all along. “No, we’re research assistants. We’re working with a friend who’s a writer, and he’s interested in doing a true crime book about the case.”
Longhorn arched his brows at this and opened his mouth to say something else. Before he could, we heard noise from the door on the far wall.
We all turned to watch as Lonnie Carlisle was brought into the room.
He was balding and bent over as he shuffled his way to the table, led by a guard. His feet were encased in cuffs with chains that ran between them. Another chain ran from this one up to his waist, where it circled around him. His wrists were contained in cuffs that were attached to this waist chain. The man looked like the setup for a Houdini stunt.
The guard pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the table and Lonnie shuffled over and dropped into it. He took us all in with a sweeping, wary glance and then settled his gaze on his lawyer. The guard retreated through the door he had come in, but he didn’t go far. I could see his silhouette on the other side through the small, mesh-filled window.
“Mr. Carlisle,” I started. “Thank you for agreeing to talk to us.”
“I didn’t agree to talk to anyone,” Lonnie grumbled. “I said I would meet with you and hear you out.” His voice was hoarse and raspy, and it made me taste burnt toast.
“They’re here about the Gruber-Hermann case,” Longhorn told Lonnie. “Supposedly someone wants to write a book about it.”
Lonnie had been leaning forward, arms on his knees. With Longhorn’s announcement, he leaned back in his chair as far as his chains would let him, effectively distancing himself from us. “I got nothing to say about that case,” he said, his lips set with determination.
With this statement, the taste of his voice changed from burnt toast to something more like a burnt marshmallow—pasty, with a metallic tinge to it.
“We aren’t here to try to pin anything on you,” Tyrese explained. “We’re simply on a fact-finding mission for the book, as your lawyer said.”
Lonnie said nothing. He just sat there, a defiant look on his face.
After many long seconds of silence, Lonnie turned and looked over his shoulder. “Guard!” he yelled. “I’m done here.”
The guard who had brought him in reentered and Lonnie stood and allowed himself to be escorted from the room the same way he’d come in.
“I guess this trip is a bust for you,” Longhorn said. He looked pleased. I found myself wishing Duncan had been able to come with us because he’s good at talking to people and getting things out of them. But he wasn’t there and I didn’t see much point in dwelling on it.
“He knows something about that case,” I said. “Why doesn’t he want to talk about it?”
Longhorn eyed me curiously for a moment and then shrugged. “There’s a chance he might be paroled soon. I’m guessing he doesn’t want to dredge up anything that might risk him being denied.”
With that, Longhorn got up, went to the door we had come in, and knocked three times. The door opened a moment later and Longhorn left.
“You folks done here?” Karl said.
Without a word, we all got up and retraced our steps out of the prison and to the parking lot. Once we were in the car, Mal turned to me in the backseat and said, “You sensed something about Carlisle. What was it?”
“He definitely knows something about the girls’ case,” I told him. “I have a feeling that he’s afraid. Maybe his lawyer was right and he’s afraid of messing up his chances at parole.”
“But you don’t think that’s what it is, do you?” Mal said, eyeing me closely.
I frowned as I considered his question. “I’m not sure what to think. But I did get the sense that his fear was more visceral than simple worry about his parole.”
Tyrese started the car and headed for the exit gate. “I’ll make a call to the warden tomorrow and chat with him about Lonnie, see if he can add any insight. I’ll find out who’s been visiting him, who he talks to, what he’s said to the guards and such. Maybe that will give us a clue.”
I glanced at my watch and said, “Well, since this trip was a bust, should we try another tack?”
“Have something in mind?” Tyrese asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s drop in on the neighborhood weirdo.”