CHAPTER 14

Chicago, October 24, 2019

RORY HAD NEVER APPRECIATED POSTCOITAL AFFECTION AND, IN FACT, needed her space after intimacy. Having slept together for ten years, Lane no longer questioned Rory’s stealthy escape from the bedroom after sex. During the early phase of their relationship, she used to wait until Lane was asleep before attempting her getaway, but now it was just expected. She was slow and quiet as she slipped from beneath the covers, pulling a tank top over her head and tiptoeing downstairs.

In the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator, spilling soft light across the floor as she grabbed a Dark Lord. In her office, Rory sat at her desk and opened the file that waited there. With the rest of the house dark, her workspace was lit only by the soft auburn glow of the desk lamp. She took a sip of stout and began reading.

The Thief had hired the law firm of Garrison Ford immediately after his arrest. The 1979 retainer had been $25,000, which was paid with a cashier’s check. The total fee for representation, which included the failed defense and the contentious trial, was close to $120,000—also paid via cashier’s check in four lumps between the summer of 1979 and the winter of 1981. All of this information was contained in the third and final box Ron Davidson had delivered, along with the file from her father’s office and the information Judge Boyle had provided.

Rory took a sip of beer and turned the page. The best she could piece together, her father had become involved with The Thief during the appeals process, after the sixty-year sentence had been handed down. Garrison Ford continued to bill for services into 1982, when her father left the firm to start his own practice. Cross-referencing documents she unearthed from her father’s file cabinets at his law office, Rory found a transition of invoicing that started in the later half of 1982. The first check was written to the Moore Law Group on October 5, 1982, to finance the second round of appeals.

Rory found that all reimbursements—old Xerox copies of handwritten checks—were full lump-sum payments. Over another beer, she learned that in addition to being a cold-blooded killer, her father’s client was also a millionaire. At the time of his arrest, he had a net worth of $1.2 million. The man’s financials were intimately detailed in his file because, in addition to handling appeals and representation at parole hearings, the man had also hired her father to look after his fortune during his incarceration, a task that included resolving debts, bringing his estate into order, and liquidating assets. Dipping into the dark side of criminal defense, Rory saw how her father had structured this man’s fortune in an oasis of LLC corporations and trusts to hide assets and protect against the threat of civil lawsuits. Sheltered as it was, had the families of his other alleged victims gone after him, a large portion of his money would be off-limits.

But no civil suits were ever filed. Without bodies, Rory knew, a civil suit would be deemed frivolous. The remains of only one woman were found during the summer of 1979. Her name was Samantha Rodgers, and although there had been an attempt, Rory read, to tie The Thief to this woman, the attorneys at Garrison Ford had managed to convince the judge that any evidence linking their client to Samantha Rodgers was purely circumstantial. The judge agreed and the prosecution dropped their pursuit, instead focusing on Angela Mitchell.

Her father’s client’s money stayed protected, and, all told, when the killer settled into his cell in the early 1980s, he did so with more than $900,000 resting in a bank account. Through the 1980s, Rory’s father had drawn from those funds to pay his legal fees during the lengthy appeals process, which dragged on for a decade.

In addition to checks rendered for legal services, Rory also came across additional payments categorized as “retainer fees.” Over the course of the 1980s, the Moore Law Group had been paid more than $200,000. It was a steep sum to simply file appeals. The roots of her curiosity stretched deeper into her mind as she recognized that her father’s connection to this man went beyond the typical attorney-client relationship.

What were you doing for this guy, Dad?

Rory read the details of the appeals her father had crafted, which highlighted the prosecution’s weaknesses. They included, conveniently, that the district attorney could produce no physical evidence against his client, including the body of his alleged victim. Adding to the absence of Angela Mitchell’s remains, Rory’s father had argued that the woman was mentally retarded, as was stated in the 1979 brief. The term “cognitively challenged” was still decades away, and labeling her as “autistic” was less dramatic, too medical, and didn’t fit the narrative. A mentally retarded schizophrenic was much more powerful. But no matter which adjectives had been used to describe Angela Mitchell, none were quite right. As Rory learned more about what the woman had done, and the lives she had surely saved, nowhere in the documents was Angela Mitchell described as “hero.”

According to the statement by the prosecutor, Angela had spent the last days of her life compiling evidence that pointed a strong finger at the 1979 killer. She was killed during the process.