FIVE

The revival of the investigation started on little more than a lark. In August 2001, a woman from the Johnson County crime lab came out to Olathe to ask if they happened to have any cold cases. Legend around the police station held that if ever there were a case that needed resuscitating—with a little help from a modern forensic specialist and God—it was David Harmon’s murder. Since the torrential flood that had soaked the case file, there had been little, if any, progress. It had been years since John and Sue Harmon had called asking for the slightest update and, without their push to roust anyone, time and inertia had taken their toll. The joke was that the only way to get put in charge of the Harmon case was to ask.

The man who finally did the asking was Olathe Police Department Detective Bill Wall. Taking over the Harmon case was not the self-destructive career move it appeared to be on the surface. Since the original investigation was not his mishap, what did he have to lose? Wall asked his supervisor, Sergeant Steve James, to reopen the case, and together they lobbied their commander, Mel Richie, for the chance to revive the investigation in its entirety and—here was the showstopper—for a budget to follow through on any and all leads. Wall and James both admired Roger LaRue, now retired. LaRue had been their mentor. If they could resurrect this case, and solve it, it would be as much for his sake as for theirs.

Ever since Wall had joined the Olathe Police Department as a patrol officer, he’d heard snippets here and there about the Harmon case from Roger and the older detectives. He heard how the Nazarenes had amassed enough power to squelch the thing and Wall, as much as he loved Roger, could not fathom how he could have let any organization obstruct a murder investigation. But it was Wall, Roger explained, who couldn’t fathom the political pressure coming from Dennis Moore, the district attorney. This is what hamstrung the Harmon case. It was not as if the DA wished for anyone to get away with murder. But the other detectives were unanimous in thinking that Moore, politically ambitious (and soon to be elected to Congress), did not want to go out on a limb to anger the Nazarene Church.

Wall thought he’d have better luck this time around. He had a reputation within the department for being able to elicit confessions like no one else.

To Wall and James’s considerable surprise, they were granted a larger budget than they ever expected, one that allowed for both DNA testing and extensive travel. In terms of DNA, their base of information was almost nil. The only reliable blood testing available at the time of the murder was for type, slight by modern standards. What’s more, samples cannot be preserved forever. Blood degrades—we do return to dust, despite the rigorous efforts of science. There was no telling how decipherable any of the blood evidence would prove.

Wall and James were making the fair assumption from the blood type and their best hunches that all the blood samples were David’s. The attack was not the sort of scratch and claw struggle that would leave both attacker and victim wounded, with their DNA mixed. In the cold calculation of investigators, such murders are ideal.

In this case, though, the blood evidence would probably illustrate what they already knew, which was also what the detectives of nineteen years earlier suspected, but had been unable to prove. Melinda’s home-invasion testimony was transparently false. David’s blood was on her pillow, but not on her own head, which meant she had not been sleeping, as she claimed, at the moment the chilling blows crushed her husband’s skull. There was also blood spattered on the lower portion of her nightgown, indicating that instead of being jolted awake by the attack and running away, Melinda instead stood at a moderate distance and watched as her husband was bludgeoned to death.

More blood—presumably David’s—had been found on the lower reaches of the shower curtain. Someone had been hell bent on cleaning up after the murder, but had missed some traces. Blood had also been found in Mark’s apartment, on a swatch of carpet, and, curiously, inside his vacuum cleaner. Cumulatively this evidence had the potential to be damning but was a long way from proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if all the results came back positive, which was doubtful, the evidence would be more incriminating for Melinda than for Mark—she was the only one who could definitely be placed at the murder scene.

The advanced DNA tests that could peg what blood sample belonged to whom with near mathematical certainty could take anywhere from several weeks to several months. Wall and James were concerned that if they waited for the results, someone with a distant connection to the church would tip off Mark and Melinda to the fact that the case had been re-opened. So without any conclusive DNA evidence, a murder weapon, or even a single witness, Wall and James decided to forge ahead.

All they had was the element of surprise.

Now officially the first new players in the investigation since the Reagan era, Wall and James went over the case file folder by folder until they felt like putting wash rags on their eyes. They then spoke to Paul Morrison. He had been an assistant district attorney at the time. The Harmon apartment was Paul’s first murder scene, and he had always promised to do something to solve the mystery when he had the chance. Now he was a popular district attorney, a dozen years into office. Morrison, in the midst of striving for higher political ambitions, never did get around to doing that “something.” Now was his chance. He pledged his unwavering support.

Wall and James’s first stop was a Sunday dinner at the Harmon home in Chili. James felt it was crucial to find out as much as they could to help bring the corpse to life in the courtroom. Here, the key would be to listen—which, as Wall was the first to admit, was a skill with which he had trouble. Wall had a gift for gab and James’s quiet nature meant Wall could take the lead with his blessing. There was no hierarchy here.

Wall and James did not go to the Harmons to goad them into talking about any particular piece of evidence—they knew that the old couple did not know much more than they did—but as a starting point, the Harmons seemed as good as any. There was a distant chance that there would be insights, a sudden memory of ill-conduct on Melinda’s part that would magically put her role in the crime in a revealing new light.

Having an investigative file in an old murder case that reads like an obituary page hampers any investigation. Here the roster of the living, at this stage in the investigation, did as much good as the dead. David’s father, John, told Wall and James what he could about David and his memories of the old investigators like LaRue, while Sue displayed the family photos, pointing out how she had torn Melinda from her scrapbooks. There was, however, no magic in Chili, no case-closing revelation. Beyond the fruitless trip to the Harmons, Wall and James did not want to start contacting old witnesses for fear word in the still-tight knit community of Nazarenes would leak back to Mark and Melinda. The only way to prevent that was to confront the suspects directly.

Deciding to drop in on Melinda first was an intuitive decision, really, no better than a hunch. Mark, given his Harvard MBA and subsequent accomplishments, was probably a tactician who wouldn’t scare easily. Wall and James also assumed he wouldn’t make the gross miscalculation that stood as their major hope—spouting off details about the case without asking for a lawyer.

Melinda seemed the better bet. From the looks of the files, Melinda probably would have told all in the days after David’s murder if Lambert had not been allowed to run the show. Perhaps she had grown remorseful over time. Wall felt that because the murder victim was her husband, maybe at some level she needed to clear her conscience.

It was anyone’s guess, but both Wall and James agreed that Mark’s conscience would be pretty complacent.

In the privacy of her ornate, double-height foyer, Melinda Raisch—wearing a bathrobe, her hair wrapped just-so in the spiral of a bath towel—listened as Detective Wall, standing with Detective James and Eric Griffin, said, “We came to talk to you about the murder of your husband, David. We’ve reopened the case and we’re hoping you can help us.”

Wall tried to sound neutral, even sympathetic, to pull her into the fold. While interviewing a suspect—something Wall did with a greater rate of success than anyone Olathe had ever seen—he always had to be thinking and adapting. Like all businesses, his was a cold-blooded one, composed of little more than tactics and strategies that had to be crafted, then constantly reassessed. With luck, in the end, you won out with a confession. Most times you got heated denials or blank stares.

“Step right this way,” Melinda said. “Care for coffee? I’ll make a fresh pot.”

“If we could sit down with you, that’d be great,” Wall replied. “Do you want to take a moment to get yourself changed?” She could not be questioned only one hand grip from being naked.

“Sure,” said Melinda, her tone matter-of-fact, curt.

“We’ll wait here,” Wall said, as Melinda turned and walked up the stairs.

The phone rang. Melinda picked up after a single ring. If she picked up that fast, she must be jumpy. Who could be on the other end? Was the caller offering a warning about a couple of Kansas detectives snooping around? Besides asking Griffin to case the house, Wall and James had done hardly any background work in order to maintain the element of surprise. They knew the arms of the Nazarene community in Olathe were long and stretched back to Ohio.

The house, as they expected, seemed empty but for Melinda upstairs. Crosses, inspirationals, and ornate religious-themed decorations were set about with precision. The bedroom was well out of earshot, too far away for them to tell if she was off the phone yet, their overriding concern. What was taking her so long? Wall envisioned her coming down and saying, “Sorry, that was my father. I can’t talk to you now. Or ever.”

Yet she soon returned, dressed in blue sweat pants and a white Gap sweatshirt. She had brushed her hair.

Melinda showed them to the kitchen table, sitting at the head. Wall sat next to her, James on her other side, Eric one person removed. In this light, the toll that time had taken on Melinda was clear. Her face, compared to the suggestive young woman of the file photos of years ago, had been ravaged by age. Or guilt.

Wall started over, asking for her help.

“I don’t know how I can help,” she replied. Wall said that they had new DNA evidence and were close to breaking the case. This was an exaggeration, but as he spoke he did his best to size Melinda up. Wall thought she could best be described as unflinching. Melinda had a knack for religious conformity, and a way of shaking her head in disapproval at those not willing to seek out the promise of better days with Jesus by their side. She could quote scripture in her sleep, or patiently wage a war of attrition on a lost soul. She hadn’t, after all, blurted out a conscience-clearing confession at the front door. The key was whether Melinda, who was about their age, had been taken unaware by their arrival or had been, on some primitive level, expecting them for years, strangers from an official world far removed from her life of evangelical Christianity. In truth, Wall was pleased Melinda hadn’t told them all to get lost.

“And you were there that night,” Wall continued after a long pause. “What do you remember about the case?”

“Well,” Melinda said, looking down, “I remember that night seeing a man, a shadowy figure hitting David. I ran to the bathroom and then downstairs. And the man came down. And it was dark. He was in the living room. He was wearing a homemade cloth mask.”

Wall had to stop himself from sliding off the chair. Without any prompting beyond a simple, open-ended question, the pair of black guys was out in favor of one man and a cloth mask. It was inconceivable. Had Melinda forgotten her cover story? Or had she just decided to tell the God’s honest truth? And if so, why did it take so little? If Roger LaRue and the boys had gotten her away from her cursing, threatening father, could they have done this nineteen years ago?

Wall and James had to stop themselves from making eye contact, which might break the spell. Even Eric, who knew only the rough outline of the case, was astounded but kept his composure.

Wall, handed the option on a platter, confronted her with the discrepancy. Forget Wall the master interrogator. A kindergarten finger painter could have run this show.

“You seem to be remembering it a little differently than back in 1982,” he said. “Did you lie then?”

She hadn’t lied, Melinda said, she was just frightened. Frightened for her life. “But I have a feeling, a feeling in my heart that this it how it happened.”

This set a pattern for the next two hours, where everything would be a “feeling” and nothing a fact. To lead off, for whatever reason, with such apparent candor and then bob and weave, hinting that there was more, led Wall to believe they were dealing with a weird bird. At several points, when an apparent impasse had been reached and the repetition got almost comical, Wall and James pushed out their chairs, an affectation meant to force Melinda into a corner. They were leaving, Wall said, to talk to neighbors, school officials, and customers of her husband’s dental practice.

“We didn’t come to Ohio for nothing,” he said. “We’re going to do plenty of background. And that’s what you do when you do background—you talk to neighbors. And we’re going to check with the children’ attendance office, to make sure they haven’t been absent too much. To check for domestic abuse.”

Melinda’s hand rose in protest each time.

“No,” she said, “don’t go. I want to help. Tell me how I can help you.”

Wall said, “All you can tell us is the truth, and if the truth hurts you, so be it.”

Whereupon Melinda would dish out another small tidbit, like about her emotionally inappropriate relationship with Mark. Wall brought up the letters, but she was adamant that there was no sex, that it was an unconsummated—though inappropriate—relationship. Wall did not doubt that. Melinda said that there was never any intercourse even when she was engaged to David, just heavy petting and oral sex. A lack of sex in this repressed religious environment—and the tantalizing prospect of it—might have laid siege to young Mangelsdorf.

“You must have killed your husband, then,” Wall said. “Either you or Mark, or both, working together.”

“I can tell you this. I did not kill my husband.”

Did Mark? she was asked repeatedly.

Melinda would fall silent, but never become overly emotional. Wall found Melinda strangely malleable and yet equally manipulative. He also had a close shave with a colossal error, telling her he wanted her to be on “the right side of the investigation,” in response to her wanting him to be her advocate. Despite Wall’s attempts at a repair job—defining “advocate” every which way but the one that would get the interview in legal trouble—she would not let the concept go.

The detectives were interrupted by another phone call and a deliveryman. Both the phone and the doorbell gave the detectives a hundred heart attacks apiece. At one point Wall pulled out the manila crime scene photos, a gallery of images guaranteed to give even someone who had not been married to David wakeful nights. Melinda turned her head and shoved her chair back as if bitten.

Wall told her that the investigation was going forward and unless she got on the right side of the investigation, she’d never see her children again.

Melinda sat with her face in her hands, silent for what seemed to be minutes.

“I was woken up by thuds,” she said finally, “and I shot up and ran to the bathroom. And I was frightened and scared and terrified so I froze in there. Then I decided to run downstairs. And soon I saw a shadowy figure of a man, with some type of homemade cloth mask.”

Then she added, “And I knew in my heart that it was Mark.”

Without a tape or video recorder, he had to get her to the local sheriff ’s department to revive their discussion there. He discussed this with Melinda and—to his surprise—she was more than willing. She just had to make new car pool arrangements for piano and tennis practice for her son and daughter—who were eleven and seven years old. She went to the downstairs bathroom, and then came directly back.

“I wish I had something to feed you all,” she said.

It must have been a lonely ride to the sheriff ’s department for Melinda, who sat in the front seat and said nothing. Wall and James, in the back seat, only once risked eye contact.

In the interrogation room, Melinda made a phone call, saying she was tied up with something and would be done shortly.

Wall’s conversation with Melinda in the interrogation room started along the same course as it had at Melinda’s house.

“But, the more I absorb this, okay,” she said, “what I told you back at the house is how I really sense things happened.”

She was deluding herself, alternately reliving 1982 and detaching herself from what was going on in the present.

Wall mentioned Melinda’s technically chaste relationship with Mark.

“David would not have approved. Is that fair?”

“We flirted in a way we should not have,” Melinda answered.

“That would explain the letters,” he said.

She mentioned that Mark had somehow signaled to her that something unmentionably bad might befall her husband. “I feel terrible for saying that,” she said, “because it makes it seem as if I didn’t stop something bad from happening.”

“There are only two people who could have killed him,” Wall said.

“Well it wasn’t me. Let me get that clear right now.”

“All right. If you say you didn’t kill him, who did?”

“Well, I know in my heart it was Mark.”

Wall bore in on the glaring inconsistency with her earlier accounts, saying that she must have been protecting Mark because she had played a role in the murder and wanted her husband dead.

“Well I guess you say things out of protection,” she added, not mentioning whether she was protecting herself, Mark, or both. “In my heart, I always knew it was him.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell the real story?” Wall asked.

“It was a sense of horror to me to ever think about it or go there, okay?”

“You didn’t want to deal?”

“Right, because my hands were full dealing with grief and a new life and trying to make sense of life in general.”

“Mark Mangelsdorf was pretending to be David’s friend while romancing his wife and planning to kill him,” Wall said. “But that was going on and you knew about it and you weren’t doing anything about it?”

“Well, yeah, and that I would be blamed for not crusading more for my marriage.”

“Well, that day, you must have sensed something.”

“I was very confused.”

“Because of the feelings you were having for your husband and this man, Mark. I think it’s safe to say that you were in love with two guys at the same time.”

Melinda shrugged. “Could be.” She leaned forward, plaintive. “How can I help you fill in more voids here? I never not loved my husband, okay? I want to help you fill in any voids here.”

“You have been living with this for a long time, and you had to get on with your life,” Wall said, “and just haven’t thought about it?”

“I don’t mean that in a heartless way,” she answered.

Melinda spoke about where she was at fault—not truncating Mark’s flirtations. “But where I’m bad, where this is bad, is that I was negligent in not nipping that off. I should have said, ‘Buzz off ’ and I’m not saying he did it without encouragement from me, because there were times that I befriended him and probably was flirtatious in a way and I shouldn’t have been. So I’m not saying it was all his fault.”

She repeated her calls for Wall to be her advocate, something he had to all but use the Jaws of Life to extricate himself from. He said he would call Paul Morrison to see if he couldn’t get her some form of a deal.

Wall told Morrison that Melinda was actually talking—and how—but hadn’t made a full confession yet. Morrison wasn’t willing to offer a deal unless she told everything. Wall went back to talk to Melinda.

“Do you still think the truth is more important than what happens to you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said “but your humanness comes out.”

“If you had knowledge,” Wall began to say.

“That’s the part you know, see,” Melinda interrupted. “I did not have specific knowledge, but I’ve told you I have knowledge.”

“Well, then there are no secrets.”

“I had warnings I did not heed, and I’m devastated.”

“So there is a little more here?”

Melinda looked at Wall. “There’s a little more,” she said.

There was more to tell, but Melinda needed a true advocate, a lawyer. “I need to know where I stand,” Melinda said. Wall, drained by this point and bound by law, relented. He hoped that the conversation would be continued shortly, but that was the last Wall spoke to Melinda that day. The next morning, Wall called to say that they would not be canvassing neighbors and school board members and could they talk again today?

Melinda said most definitely not.

Wall could only guess why Melinda abruptly changed her mind. Had someone else gotten to her? It could have been one of any number of people—her father, her new husband, a lawyer. All he knew for certain was that he would be heading back to Kansas without the benefit of an explanation for Melinda’s sudden reversal, or any more time to interview Melinda. Without that, there was only one person left to see.

With Christmas coming, Mark’s ambush would have to wait. Wall and James, both family men, knew that no matter what the career stakes were or how much hung in the balance in terms of justice, traveling anywhere in the vicinity of Christmas and New Year’s was as good a way as any to antagonize their wives.

Wall and James were also in a bind. They had to keep a tight lid on the case, but now that they had contacted Melinda, there was a chance she would tell Mark, who could then hire a team of sterling lawyers before their investigation gained any traction.

Paul Morrison was personally taking on the prosecution of both Mark and Melinda. In an ideal world, Mark, who had probably wielded the club, was Morrison’s big-ticket item, so Morrison decided to discuss a plea deal with Melinda’s attorneys that would allow her to plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder—say, being an accessory to murder—in exchange for testifying against Mark and receiving a drastically reduced sentence. It would not be to Melinda’s advantage, then, to give Mark an inkling of what was afoot, lest he turn on her and grab a deal first.

In mid-January 2002, after initial plea discussions with Melinda proved fruitless, Wall and James headed to Plano, Texas, opting to drive, since they had been unsettled by their post–September 11 flights to and from Ohio. This gave the Plano Police Department time to case Mark’s house—just as Griffin had done in Ohio—in order to make sure he would be home when Wall and James popped out of the past.

Posing as officials from the alarm company looking to forward updated information to the local police, Wall and James found out from Kristina exactly when Mark, who at the time was commuting halfway across the country to the Virginia headquarters of Omni Services, would be home. They were not so much lying to Kristina as they were selectively informing her. Like the ruse about DNA with Melinda, such maneuvers were wholly legal. Finding out when Mark was home would, as it turned out, be the easy part. Mark, they guessed, was more worldly than Melinda, would have more psychological armature in place, and would not be as eager to please.

It was nearly 6:00 P.M. when Mark Mangelsdorf answered the knock at his door.

After their success with Melinda, Wall (with a tape recorder hidden in his sleeve) and James had a good deal more confidence. The detectives introduced themselves and Mark turned visibly stiff, rigid. Wall noticed with some glee that Mark’s right hand was shaking.

“We are going to need a minute of your time,” said Wall cheerfully. “Is anybody else here?”

Mark, still unnerved, shook his head no. Wall thought they were going to have to hook this guy up to a tow chain to pull him up off the floor. He told Mark they would like him to come down to the Plano Police Department so they could, in a quaint turn of phrase, “share” some new developments in the case.

“How would that be?” Wall asked.

Gathering himself, Mark answered, “Actually, I’d prefer not to do anything without a lawyer.”

Mark’s invoking his right to counsel, as the phrase goes, should have ended the interview. Wall, too jazzed, was only just beginning.

“Okay, well, I thought you might say that, but I think if I were you, I mean if—I would be awful curious about what’s going on. We talked to Melinda. Have you talked to her lately?”

“I have not.”

Wall adopted a sort of jaunty casualness in his tone. He told Mark that Melinda was living in Ohio, and tried to gauge whether Mark knew that already. He didn’t appear to. Mark affected a calm, welcoming look, though considering the circumstances there was almost a hint of mockery to it.

“You . . . you haven’t seen her in twenty years?” Wall asked. When Mark answered that he hadn’t, Wall again asked if they could “share” some of their new developments with him.

“Still . . . still don’t . . .” Mark stammered.

Advantage Wall, who smiled broadly. He had gotten one over on Mark by just showing up at his front door. “Looks like you are a little off base here. Are you caught off guard here a little bit?”

“Absolutely,” said Mark, who seemed more clear-eyed upon hearing the sound of his own honest answer.

“You are probably wondering how we found you and all that kind of stuff, right?”

It was a bad question, as a simple Internet search could do the trick. “I’m not wondering that. You know, I haven’t made my whereabouts hidden or anything like that,” Mark replied, showing less deference.

“Have you heard anything about the case in the last twenty years?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you been curious about what happened? James and I have been investigating this case and seems to me like you just kind of left without much being said. Is that fair?”

“You know,” said Mark, “I don’t want to comment on any assumptions that you are making. I have, I certainly have my perspectives and point of view, but—”

Wall saw the door beginning to open. “Well, we would love to sit down and talk to you about—”

Mark waved him off. “Based on, based on the way things were at the time, I didn’t feel things were fair. The way I left it with my attorney at the time”—again, a bothersome reference to an attorney—“Hugh and Scott Kreamer asked me not to speak any further with the police about the case without having an attorney present.”

“Yeah,” said Wall, still on a roll, “but that was twenty years ago. We were just—we re-opened the case—you’ve heard of cold cases, haven’t you?”

“Not really. No.”

Wall briefly explained the process. “We went back and re-interviewed all the old cops that you knew probably. Do you remember any of their names?”

“I don’t.”

“‘Roger LaRue,’ does that ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Well, we went back and did all that kind of stuff and now it’s kind of led us back to you ’cause we wanted to get your perspective twenty years later as to what your thoughts were on all this. That’s why we traveled down from Olathe today to come visit you. That’s why we knocked on your door. I’m sure we caught you completely off guard and you’re probably nervous about it. You probably haven’t even thought about this in a long time. And that’s why we’d like to invite you down to the police department. You’ll drive or come in our car. You’re not under arrest. We just want to share some of these things with you.”

“I will not do that without an attorney,” Mark said.

After more back and forth about the unsolved nature of the case, Wall asked a loaded question. “You’re in sales, right?”

“No, I’m in general management. Chief Operating Officer of a company.”

“Well, you have a beautiful home, that’s for sure.” Mark had let them into the foyer—no sign of religion here—but he had let them in only to avoid a spectacle in front of the house, not as any sort of welcome.

Kevin Grisham, the local escort, had, like James, been silent up to this point. He probably should have broken things up after Mark asked for a lawyer more times that he could count on his fingers, but now he was overwhelmed by curiosity.

“Does your wife know about this?” Grisham asked.

“Pardon, yes,” Mark replied.

“Okay. She knows everything that’s happened in the past?”

“Uh, well, you say everything that’s happened in the past?”

“This case?” Grisham asked.

“She’s aware of this case, yes.”

“Did you ever share with her your thoughts that back then you thought they focused on you as a suspect?”

“Yes.”

Conversationally, Wall, for one of the first times in his life, was flustered. He did not want to leave things on a “down” note, especially after how well the drop-in with Melinda had gone. He went on a bit about search warrants that had been served on Mark’s home and car, but soon Grisham knew it was time to end what was turning into a charade. He noted Mark’s request for a lawyer but asked if he’d give a mouth swab for DNA before they left.

Mark said no, and Wall was in on him again, talking about how they had traveled so far to get here. Mark replied that he had a phone and they should have called.

It was a tactic, Wall said. Didn’t Mark use tactics in business?

“Uh, I certainly do.”

“And I try to use those kinds of tactics too,” said Wall, almost apologetically explaining too much.

No sooner had Wall said that then Kristina walked in the front door.

“Hi,” she said, hospitable, but obviously puzzled.

Mark spoke up quickly. “Kristina, these folks are from the Olathe police and this gentleman is from the Plano Police Department. I’ll get an attorney, but I choose not to talk to them.”

“Okay,” Wall said.

“Okay,” Kristina repeated, “thank you.”

They all exchanged business cards and brittle good-byes. Wall and James had put the thousand-yard stare into Mark.

A few days later, Wall, James, and Grisham returned, pulling into Mark’s driveway just as Mark did. As Mark went to lug wine coolers out of his trunk for a party that night—Wall and James exchanging wry looks at the nice Nazarene boy who now apparently drank—he was informed they were there to obtain a DNA swab.

Getting DNA from Mark was part act of intimidation and part fishing expedition. The intimidation portion of the equation was fairly self-evident. Wall and James sensed rightly that the prospect of modern DNA testing on ancient pieces of evidence must be a source of sleepless nights for anyone who has gotten away with a murder that’s been declared a “cold case.” With only a small chance that a sample could tie Mark inexorably to the crime, their larger objective was surprising Mark, and unsettling him once he was surprised. There is no telling what will happen when you make an important man sweat.

Mark set down the wine coolers and said in a polite but guarded tone that he wouldn’t give a sample without talking to his lawyer. Grisham told Mark that under Texas law, a warrant was all they needed and, if necessary, they could tackle him and get it that way instead. Just the same, Grisham said, as a courtesy, Mark could call his lawyer if he wanted. No need to do things the hard way here.

Mark went inside the house to call, carrying his wine coolers with him. Wall sidled up to Kristina.

“I don’t know how much you know about this case,” he told her, “but you need to do some research on it or something. You have to find out what he did.”

“Okay,” she said, refusing to engage.

Mark returned, having been unable to get through to his lawyer. Faced with the prospect of being on the wrong end of a dog pile of detectives, he allowed them to swab his mouth.

The lawyer Mark could not get through to was Scott Kreamer, the son of Hugh Kreamer, the powerful old district attorney who took Mark on as his last case. Scott was working out of a law office right down the block from the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe, where a trial most likely would be held. Kreamer had a local practice that didn’t revolve around big-ticket criminal cases (he specialized in divorces or “matrimonial law”) but his firm was seen as a player in the Kansas legal community. With his Kansas contacts, Kreamer could come in handy.

Morrison, meanwhile, was taking his time in bringing charges in the case. This came both from necessity and in an attempt to turn Mark skittish. He was also limited by the evidence, which was hardly exhaustive. The swab Mark donated under threat of being pounced on did not, as expected, amount to anything. Investigators still had a fingerprint on the back patio, but Mark never disputed spending time at David and Melinda’s duplex. Copious amounts of David’s DNA in Mark’s apartment, now confirmed with near certainty, could also be excused with a variant of the same explanation—David had been to his apartment numerous times. If Melinda caved and turned evidence, Mark would have his first significant problem but, even there, Mark’s lawyers could argue that Melinda had now told two different stories and would presumably have to tell a third.

Melinda refused to barter that third story for lenience and was indicted for murder in December 2003. Thinking better of an attempt to indict Mark at this point, considering the still circumstantial nature of the case against him, Morrison instead named Mark in Melinda’s indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator, effectively placing him in a legal purgatory. Not officially accused yet publicly named, Mark remained, as he had been for years, uncharged. And yet Melinda’s indictment, in the stilted, hedged voice of a legal document, brought the night of the murder, and Mark’s part in it, alive after so many years of silence:

Mark Mangelsdorf and/or Melinda Harmon aka Melinda Raisch struck David Harmon numerous times in the head with a blunt instrument, killing him. Mark Mangelsdorf and/or Melinda Harmon aka Melinda Raisch moved the blanket covering the body of David Harmon, pulled out a drawer in the bedroom and took a lid off a dish containing keys to make it appear as though a residential robbery had occurred. . . . Mark Mangelsdorf left the above mentioned residence and disposed of the murder weapon.

In the long lead-up to Melinda’s trial, the case against Mark never did magically get better. Without Melinda’s testimony, it would simply be a truncated case. If legal proceedings against Melinda unraveled in acquittal, Mark might never be formally charged. As a result, Mark took Melinda’s legal fate with the utmost seriousness.

In the midst of such personal uncertainty, Mark’s corporate good fortunes took yet another turn. Cintas, the nation’s largest uniform renter, purchased Omni in an effort to expand cross-selling opportunities and to save costs on redundancies. Mark made millions on the deal, enough to elicit a giddy mention from Kristina in her European boarding-school alumni magazine.

After the Cintas-Omni takeover, one of the redundancies in the post was the position of chief operating officer. Mark had to take the money and run, which he did, and gladly, as he no longer had to commute by airplane. In short order, Mark was able to secure his loftiest post yet, the one that could propel him into the chief executive officer slot of a reputable multi-billion dollar multinational organization.

In 2004, Parmalat’s President and CEO, Mike Rosicki, made Mark what they call in corporate work “an offer he could not refuse”—to start and run an entirely new carbonated beverage division at an international conglomerate with an uncannily long string of profitable years. Done well, it would put him in standing to be Rosicki’s successor. Mark and Kristina, who now had a baby daughter, Charlotte, moved to an elegant house in Pelham, a coveted New York City suburb, in order to commute to Parmalat’s stateside headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey.

Pelham was the closest well-appointed village in the northern portion of the suburban ring around New York City, and had thus always been home to the privileged and the elite. Appearances were kept up without fail, with the town having only a limited number of predigested troubles—a divorce here, a troubled child there, too much fondness for dirty martinis or insider trading or some skirting of what everyone could agree were obscenely large tax obligations. Residents dined in Manhattan’s best restaurants, sailed the Long Island Sound, which lay to their east, and spent weekends in repose in their stately turn-of-the-century homes.

Mark’s own yellow clapboard home, built in 1901 in the Arts and Crafts style, was three floors of arched wood molding and mullioned windows. Inside, colors like cardinal (used in the library) were chosen from decorators’ selections.

Mark now lived among the CEOs, flush with stock options, and revered bond traders—there was even a trophy in a shop downtown to commemorate the world’s most talented executives—executive editors of news magazines and those, as the local joke went, who had made expert choices of parents, zygotes with foresight who had inherited vast sums. Where the money came from was no issue. The neighbors—as well as Mark—were life’s shoo-ins, all members in good standing in certain circles.

Wealthy by his own hand, well married, admired by those in the corporate world for his reasoned outlook, expediency, and mindful nature, and with “one heckuva challenge” ahead of him, as he termed this entrepreneurial endeavor under the umbrella of a multi-billion dollar multinational, Mark was at the zenith of his professional career.

In addition to Kreamer, Mark also needed a media-savvy lawyer to smile for the news cameras, one able to make snap judgments about how different legal tactics might play out in the public square. After his move East, Mark hired Michael “Mickey” Sherman, who was based in Stamford, Connecticut, an easy ride from Pelham. Born in nearby Greenwich, Sherman’s clients were among the most privileged members of society. Sherman represented Michael Skakel, a cousin of Robert F. Kennedy, who was convicted in the murder of Martha Moxley, another cold case that involved someone being bludgeoned to death. (In this case, Moxley’s skull had been crushed by a golf club in Belle Haven, a gated section of Greenwich.) He also represented Alex Kelly, a child of means from Darien, Connecticut, who fled on the eve of his double rape trial and spent nearly a decade living the high life in Europe at various ski resorts. Sherman helped negotiate his surrender from Switzerland and even testified at Kelly’s subsequent trial that he had advised the eighteen-year-old Kelly, just before he took flight, that there was no way he would get a fair shake in Connecticut.

Although Sherman’s legal instincts in media-genic, high-profile cases (tabloids noted during the Skakel case that Sherman even resembled a Kennedy) were sound, on the odd occasion, they were questionable enough to elicit puzzled reactions. For instance, while representing a man charged with shooting ducks from his Long Island Sound yacht, Sherman ostentatiously walked into the courtroom with a pair of fake duck feet protruding from his brief case. Overall, Sherman was a clever lawyer—imperfect but clever—and, in terms of standing in society, a suitable match for Mark.

Kristina had moved from the Frito-Lay division of Pepsi back to Pepsi proper, which was based in Westchester County, right near Pelham. Now she served as head of marketing for Pepsi’s diet beverage division. Pelham was wealthier than most of its neighbors, but assiduously low-key in a way that befitted Mark and Kristina’s standing as well compensated yet private citizens.

Parmalat was located in North Jersey, which was better known for its Meadowlands swamps, but the commute from prestigious Westchester County was a small price to pay. Mark and Kristina’s new three-story, $1.3 million dollar house sat on a choice block of understated elegance typical of the Sound Shore, as the area abutting the Long Island Sound was called. Their house had six bedrooms, five bathrooms, and seven fireplaces; the property taxes alone ran nearly $30,000 a year. The house was large enough for not only Mark’s growing family, including their daughter, Charlotte (and, before long, a son named Eric), but also Mark’s children from his first marriage—Julia, Emily, and Stephen, who would often visit. Susi had relocated back to Kansas after their divorce. Theirs hadn’t been a contentious one, and Mark was generous, paying spousal support to Susi even after she remarried and started her own full-time career as a mental health therapist. He flew the children in once a month for weekend visits, and would even fly to Kansas to see school track meets. Ironically, his kids went to the same local high school as Paul Morrison’s children. On the rare occasion when both were sitting in the grandstand, they kept their distance.

At pre-trial hearings—including a big one in May, 2004, at which Melinda’s statement to Wall and James was challenged but ruled admissible—Mark’s staff of five lawyers was omnipresent in the courtroom gallery, furiously typing on their laptops. Their presence in the modest-sized Kansas courtroom—especially the presence of the telegenic Sherman, who seemed to take up twice the space of any other lawyer on the team—projected an aura of unshakable confidence.

It was also in 2004 that one of Mark’s Pelham neighbors, John Launer, a prosperous retired soap executive, began receiving a series of anonymous letters. Inside envelopes without return addresses, Launer found old Kansas newspaper clippings about poor David Harmon, bludgeoned beyond recognition. Scribbles from the sender in the margins of the articles told John in unmistakable terms that evil had arrived at his doorstep.

Launer discreetly brought the letters to Mark’s attention.

“I have no idea who would send those,” Mark said, allowing that he had been a suspect in the murder, but claiming that the then district attorney had given him a gentlemen’s agreement, in writing, never to charge him.

This implied repudiation was more than enough for Launer, who, in his retirement, had become obsessed with Mark and the case. John knew Mark, one of the few fellow Democrats in a village that traditionally did not suffer them lightly, as an intrinsically decent, clear-thinking man. Mark seemed settled in Pelham, though he had moved around a bit, which was par for the course for those in search of the corporate prize: your CEO moment, as it was called locally. Mark was one of the few men John felt he’d trust with his own children and once, when he anonymously said as much to a reporter writing a story on the case for a national newspaper, Mark cannily figured out it was him and sent John a nice thank you note, which counted for a lot.

However, the anonymous letters continued. They had begun arriving just as Mark arrived to the neighborhood. The letters were sent to many of his well-heeled neighbors, who were naturally offended by the forwardness and unsubstantiated nature of the accusations—though some were half ashamed to find themselves a more than willing audience. They’d run across their wide lawns with the packages in hand, only opening them once they reached the privacy of their homes.

Their voyeuristic guilt was amplified as Mark—most came to conclude soon after meeting him—was simply an enviable man who had the fundamentals right. There was a fair amount of consensus about that. Even those who had hunched, thrilled, over the letters could extol Mark’s virtues.

One day, after receiving yet another mysterious, anonymous letter, John Launer decided to pop the question.

He approached as Mark stood in his front yard, leaning on a rake. At a powerful 6'4", 220 pounds, and not a touch of gray in his hair, Mark seemed transported from his college days with only a slight bit of wear. It was his clean conscience, he had told an old acquaintance. As John regarded his neighbor, a cadre of high-end gardeners dressed in white descended on the vast lawns of the neighboring houses.

“Did you kill him?” John asked, at once disturbed to realize that his question came simultaneously with the sudden rev of lawn equipment. John looked at the gardeners. And again at the Harvard-educated Mark Mangelsdorf.

The gnarly accusations against Mark, no matter how injudiciously leveled, added a noticeable element to the mix of civil mindedness and old-money elegance that was more traditional local custom. Living in a bastion of such high net worth and low crime, it didn’t happen every day that one of their numbers was accused of wholesale slaughter. The privileged were titillated. But this did not provoke direct confrontation.

That is, until now.

Smiling thinly, John laughed, but the laughter came out brittle. Almost like a sigh, though it probably passed unheard because of the noise of those machines, which was incessant. He excoriated himself for waiting so long to ask the question and finally doing it at precisely—to the split-second—the wrong moment. With few alternatives springing readily to mind, he tried again, nearly shouting above the gathering din:

“Did you do it? Did you kill him?”

Why the sudden notion that this had been the right opportunity to ask? John couldn’t say, but not being absolutely sure of his instinct about Mark’s innocence was threatening to lead John’s entire worldview down a rabbit hole.

John, who could manage the large-scale sale of soap with the best of them, realized he was worn to a nub with worry by the roar of lawnmower engines and Weedwhackers and by the non-responsiveness of his younger neighbor. Was Mark leaning in close to hear what he may, in fact, not have heard? Or had he heard and was he, to John’s utter disbelief and horror, actually trying to intimidate him?

When the subject of the case came up, Mark would try to make light of it. He would roll his eyes when he spoke of the curiosity seekers who drove by his house after his address had appeared in a local newspaper. He playfully acknowledged at one point that his circumstances, his story, in this setting, seemed lifted from an English mystery novel. A story, Mark added, he’d rather be reading than living. It was all like a game of Clue, right in their own parlors, a game based on equal parts of luck, skill, and intuition.

Thankfully, for Mark, there was no shortage of advocates like John, and who better to vouch for Mark than the neighbors, whom he had invited into his home for stollen, which he had baked himself, around the holidays?

And yet: was Mark really leaning in?

If John’s ability to reason was reaching an apparent vanishing point, he could be forgiven. In spite of his reticent nature and all the social mores and niceties, John had, to his credit, finally asked the question that had long stalled so corrosively on his lips.

But how much, if any, had Mark heard?

In the quickly passing moments, John tried with all his powers of observation to gauge Mark’s reaction. It was either thoughtful, angry, or nonplussed, which did not narrow it down. Would he have to work his way up to asking the whole question again?

John took a deep breath. He stifled an alarming impulse to belly laugh at the whole surreal exchange. He had cast himself in the role of amateur investigator; he had to forge on. He raised his sights up toward his neighbor to let loose one final stab at the words.

“Mark, did you murder him?” John now all but simpered.

It was all the fault of the letters, John thought, for putting him in this awkward position. He never should have dignified them with his attention.

Surely this man, replete with talent and conviction, could not have had a downward spiral at any point in life so steep that . . .? But even in the unlikely event that Mark had done the deed, we all had the capacity to do evil, so what set him so apart? Considering all the good he had done in life, the good children he raised, the jobs he created, perhaps there could be a time when culpability ended.

Why then, John asked himself, was he so thrown and frightened? He was sure of Mark’s innocence, convinced of it.

John was informed enough in the field of psychology to know it was bunk to think of Mark as a sociopath. Even assuming he had done what the letter writer and now authorities were now sort-of, semi accusing him of, the behavior never repeated itself.

Had circumstances once aligned themselves in such a way that Mark had done the unthinkable? If so, that did not make him a sociopath—though how could he have gone on so apparently devoid of worries?

Proof positive that he had not done it.

John, glancing around at the busy lawn mowers, realized the noise would not abate. The air was filled with the scent of cut grass.

Mark leaned forward, furrowed his brow, and John saw a puzzled blink. Or maybe two. Mark had not been trying to intimidate him, in the least. He just hadn’t heard him, which, in the end, John supposed, was for the better. Let questions about this ill-fated David Harmon linger. Like most on Loring Avenue and in Pelham at large, John already had a perfect sense of where things stood.

After their marriage, Mark had become an occasional visitor of Kristina’s grandmother’s Presbyterian church, over in Scarsdale, an even tonier suburb than Pelham. Kristina’s faith kept her firmly in Mark’s camp, but in truth, Mark’s religious beliefs had now become a part of the orderly managerialism that he used to run his life. Together, Mark and Kristina were winners of innumerable corporate competitions, which gave them social currency. They were among the most successful brand managers in the United States. You could talk to any of the people who knew Mark in a work setting, and every single one of them would claim that he was assiduous in his dealings, a firm believer in fair play, gentle in his treatment of subordinates, and remarkably advanced in managerial resourcefulness. He stood by business-school principles of order and forethought, and had a true gift for collaborative leadership.

That such a man had the capacity for such grave moral error was inconceivable. And even assuming Mark had committed one horrible act, did it matter at this point? The rest of his life appeared splendidly lived. He was a credit to his community and, in fact, every community in which he had ever lived.

Save, possibly, for one.

With the heavy volume of anonymous hate mail accumulating in the mailboxes of Mark’s friends, neighbors, and colleagues, especially as the legal case heated up after Melinda’s indictment, Sherman hired Colluci Investigations, a detective agency in Stamford, Connecticut, to reveal the identity of this avenging angel. Perhaps the unmasked letter sender would be found to have had a role in the crime. Perhaps this was someone trying to deflect blame by putting pressure on false suspects like Mark. Whatever the case, Sherman wanted to pull the cloak of anonymity off the letter writer if only to get him or her to stop making Mark’s life miserable.

Colluci used a handwriting expert from Westport, Peggy Kahn, who determined that all the notes and scribbles were written by the same person. In addition to the annotations in the margins of the old newspaper clippings about the case, there were notes—most handwritten, but some typed—on blank white paper. Key points were often underlined.

A note to one of Mark’s neighbors in Pelham said:

Can’t wait to tell the bank, your neighbors, friends—school—everyone needs to know, he isn’t what he says.

Another, written in the margins of a Kansas City Star article, this one about Melinda’s indictment, read:

Mark Mangelsdorf has to pay for murder. David Harmon was a wonderful man and Mark murdered him. Mark acts real nice, doesn’t he? But here is what he did. He has to pay.

An obituary of Mark’s mother was included. The sender had circled the lines reading, “She instilled [in her children] her belief in the innate goodness of others and an appreciation for the beauty of the surrounding world. She imparted to them seeds of the personal relationship she enjoyed with her Lord and Savior,” and written, “Really?”

Letters were also sent to a host of neighbors in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where Kristina’s parents, Susan and Eric Friberg, lived.

Said one note:

Susan and Eric Friberg need the support of their neighbors and friends. The Mark Mangelsdorf in these articles is their son-in-law, married to their daughter Kristina. This is a very serious situation. Mark took part in taking another man’s life, a terrible thing, and then went on living the good life as though it never happened, also a horrible thing. How can a person do that? Meanwhile, David Harmon has no life at all, and his parents have suffered every day of their life since. Mark needs to go to prison for this, and his family, including Susan and Eric, need to NOT protect him because to do so is to take part in the very evil he has wrought.

The letters also came to Kristina’s parents and Mark’s father, directly addressing their support of Mark:

Why on earth would you want to support someone who took a life, and is unwilling to take the penalty for their awful deed? Why on earth?? You can love and support him while he is in jail, paying the price to society for murder—support him all you want then. But why on earth would you fight to keep him from paying for what he did? Because you choose to believe his lie? How self serving is that—on your part!

Colluci got a break when atop an old Kansas City Star article printed out from the newspaper’s website were the words “Welcome Marian.” Affixed to another article was an e-mail address that had started arriving in the inboxes of reporters, alerting them to new developments in the case. With the e-mail address, Colluci easily traced the mailings and letters to Marian Fuller, a secretary at a church in Manhattan, Kansas, who had been working in the same capacity at the College Church of the Nazarene at the time of the murder.

Even a defense lawyer could not claim Fuller as a potential suspect, but she had known and loved David, and was frustrated beyond description at how easily Mark had evaded criminal consequences. After Sherman’s phalanx of investigators identified Fuller and wrote her a letter threatening legal action, the career church worker stopped sending the haunting packages but still managed to keep reporters abreast of the latest news.