Silent Terror Read online

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  The Shroud Shifter speaks:

  I clipped my self-sharpening, teflon-coated, brushed-steel axe and swung it at her neck. Her head was sheared cleanly off; blood burst from the cavity, her arms and legs twitched spastically, then her whole body crumpled to the floor. The force of my swing spun me around, and for one second my vision eclipsed the entire scene — blood spattered walls, the body shooting an arterial geyser out the neck, the heart still pumping in reflex...

  Martin Plunkett has struck again.

  * * *

  James Ellroy

  I1

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  II13

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  III

  15

  IV16

  V

  VI17

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  VII21

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  * * *

  James Ellroy

  Silent Terror

  TO

  DUANE TUCKER

  FROM THE BIG APPLE TATTLER. SEPTEMBER 13, 1983:

  “SEXECUTIONER” CAPTURED!!! WESTCHESTER BOARDING HOUSE RAID NETS BEHRENS/LIGGETT — DE NUNZIO/CAFFERTY KILLER!!!

  At 3:00 A.M. this morning, the sleepy town of New Rochelle was the sight of life-and-death drama as federal agents and local police zeroed in on a tidy little boardinghouse on the edge of the downtown area.

  Inside, in a tidy little third-floor room, slept Martin Michael Plunkett, age 35, the suspected sex slayer of two sets of Westchester County lovebirds — Madeleine Behrens, 23, and her boyfriend Richard Liggett, 24, and Dominic De Nunzio, 18, and his fiancée Rosemary Cafferty, 17. Dubbed the “Sexecutioner” by local authorities, Plunkett is suspected of several other similarly brutal killings — murders that span the entire United States and go back a decade.

  But the tall, intense-looking killer wasn’t in a killing mood when G-men, led by F.B.I. Serial Killer Task Force agent Thomas Dusenberry evacuated the boardinghouse and gave him a bull-horn ultimatum: “We have you surrounded, Plunkett! Surrender, or we’ll come in and get you!”

  The 800 block of South Lockwood was deathly still in the bullhorn’s echo, then the “Sexecutioner’s” voice rang out: “I’m unarmed. I want to talk to the head man before you take me in.”

  Amidst stunned protests from both the New Rochelle SWAT Team and his fellow F.B.I. men, Inspector Dusenberry walked into the killer’s room; then, five minutes later, led Plunkett out, handcuffed. When asked what transpired during those five minutes, Dusenberry said, “The man and I talked. He wanted to make sure that when he confessed, his statement would be printed verbatim. He was quite clear about that. It seemed very important to him.”

  FROM THE “LEGAL PRECEDENTS” SECTION OF THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY, MAY 10, 1984:

  Both legal scholars and forensic psychologists continue to take a keen interest in the case of Martin Michael Plunkett, convicted in February on four counts of First Degree Murder in Westchester County, New York.

  Sentenced to four consecutive life sentences and currently held in protective custody at Sing Sing Prison, Plunkett, 36, offered no defense at his trial. Acting as his own attorney, he submitted a notarized written statement to the judge and, before a packed courtroom, repeated that statement verbatim:

  “On September 9, 1983, I murdered Madeleine Behrens and Richard Liggett. The Knife I used to kill them is wrapped in a plastic bag and buried near the southwest corner of the lake in Huguenot Park, near the corner of North Avenue and Eastchester Road in New Rochelle, New York. On September 10, 1983, I murdered Dominic De Nunzio and Rosemary Cafferty. The saw I used to dismember them is wrapped in a plastic bag and buried at the base of a sycamore tree immediately in front of the public library in Bronxville, New York. This is my first, final and only statement regarding the crimes for which I stand accused, and for any others I may be suspected as having perpetrated.”

  Investigators found the murder weapons Plunkett described, with his fingerprints on them. Forensic technicians ran batteries of tests, and said that the knife’s cutting edge matched perfectly to “SS” carvings on the legs of the four victims. Plunkett, who had maintained complete silence since his September 13 arrest, was convicted on the basis of the physical evidence and his statement.

  That silence has created a furor among law-enforcement officials who are convinced that Plunkett’s number of victims may run as high as fifty. Thomas Dusenberry, the F.B.I. agent who headed the investigation that led to Plunkett’s arrest, said, “Based on psychological workups on the Behrens/Liggett and De Nunzio/Cafferty killings and on unsolved murders and disappearances that correspond in time sequence to our knowledge of Martin Plunkett’s movements, I suspect him of at least thirty additional murders and non-sequitur disappearances. A confession, voluntary or drug-induced, would save law-enforcement agencies untold investigatory hours — many of the cases we ‘make’ Plunkett for are still open.”

  But Plunkett, whose school records indicate genius-level intelligence, will not even speak, much less confess, and, legally, he cannot be coerced into doing so. Thus, two disparate sources are petitioning New York State prison officials in an effort to gain access to his criminal memory: law enforcement agencies anxious to “clear” unsolved homicides within their jurisdictions, and forensic psychologists anxious to probe the mind of a brilliant serial murderer. All petitions have thus far been rejected by prison officials, and representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union have said they would legally intervene should mind-altering chemicals be forced on Plunkett in an effort to make him confess.

  Perhaps the last word on the Plunkett case was spoken by Sing Sing Warden Richard Wardlow: “The legal and psychological ramifications of this deal are beyond me, but I can tell you one thing: Martin Plunkett will never see daylight again. As sympathetic as I am to the cops with open homicides on their hands, they should give it up and be grateful the __________ is in custody. You can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.”

  FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, JUNE 6, 1984: “SILENT KILLER TO ‘SPEAK’ IN CRIME AUTOBIOGRAPHY”

  Literary agent Milton Alpert of M. Alpert & Associates has announced that he will be representing Martin Michael Plunkett, a convicted murderer known as the “Sexecutioner,” in the sale of his autobiographical memoir, an account that Alpert says, “pulls no punches, and is destined to be regarded as a classic text on the criminal psyche.”

  Alpert, summoned to Sing Sing by a phone call from Plunkett, who had maintained absolute silence since reading a declaration of guilt at his trial in February, said that the 36-year-old killer “feels deep remorse over his actions, and wishes to expiate his guilt with the writing of this ‘cautionary’ memoir.”

  Since New York law prohibits criminals from reaping financial reward from published accounts of their crimes, all monies earned from Plunkett’s “memoir” will go to the families of his victims. “Martin actually wants it that way,” Alpert stressed.

  Law Enforcement agencies throughout America have already expressed great interest in reading Plunkett’s in-progress manuscript, purely from a “legal” standpoint — they think it may help them to shed light on unsolved homicides that Plunkett himself (suspected by several F.B.I. officials of being a long-term serial murderer) may have committed. As part of a “mutually beneficial reciprocal agreement,” Alpert has agreed to pass along “salient information pertaining to unsolved killings” in exchange for “official police documents to help Martin ca
rry the narration of his book.”

  The as yet untitled work will be auctioned upon its completion.

  I

  Los Angeles

  1

  Dusenberry’s estimated body count was low, and Warden Wardlow’s stone metaphor only partly accurate. Inanimate objects can yield blood, but if the transfusion is to take, the letting must be sanctioned by the object’s deepest and most logical volition. Even Milt Alpert, that eminently decent expediter of literature, had to cloak the announcement of our collaboration with justification-heavy sloganeering and words I never said. He cannot accept the fact that he will be earning 10 percent of a valediction in blood. That I feel no remorse and seek no absolution is incomprehensible to him.

  A more farsighted person in my situation would seize this narrative opportunity and bend it toward the manipulation of the mental-health profession and liberal legal establishment — people susceptible to cheap visions of redemption. Since I have no expectations of ever leaving this prison, I will not do that — it is simply dishonest. Nor will I cop a psychological plea by juxtaposing my acts against the alleged absurdity of twentieth-century American life. By passing through conscious gauntlets of silence and will, by creating my own vacuum-packed reality, I was able to exist outside standard environmental influences to an exceptional degree — the prosaic pain of growing up and being American did not take hold; I transmogrified it into something more very early. Thus I stand by my deeds. They are indigenous solely to me.

  Here in my cell, I have everything I need to bring my valediction to life: world-class typewriter, blank paper, police documents procured by my agent. Along the back wall there is a Rand-McNally map of America, and beside my bunk a box of plastic-topped pins. As this manuscript grows, I will use those pins to mark the places where I murdered people.

  But above all, I have my mind; my silence. There is a dynamic to the marketing of horror: serve it up with a hyperbolic flourish that distances even as it terrifies, then turn on the literal or figurative lights, inducing gratitude for the cessation of a nightmare that was too awful to be true in the first place. I will not observe that dynamic. I will not let you pity me. Charles Manson, babbling in his cell, deserves pity; Ted Bundy, protesting his innocence in order to attract correspondence from lonely women, deserves contempt. I deserve awe for standing inviolate at the end of the journey I am about to describe, and since the force of my nightmare prohibits surcease, you will give it to me.

  2

  Guidebooks misrepresent Los Angeles as a sun-kissed amalgam of beaches, palm trees and the movies. The literary establishment fatuously attempts to penetrate that exterior and serves up the L.A. basin as a melting pot of desperate kitsch, violent illusion and variegated religious lunacy. Both designations hold elements of truth based on convenience. It is easy to love the place at first glance and even easier to hate it when you get to sense the people who live there. But to know it, you have to come from the neighborhoods, the inner-city enclaves that the guidebooks never mention and artists dismiss in their haste to paint with broad, satiric strokes.

  These places require resourcefulness; they will not give up their secrets to observers — only to inspired residents. I gave my youthful stomping ground such implacable attention that it reciprocated in full. There was nothing about that quiet area on the edge of Hollywood that I didn’t know.

  Beverly Boulevard on the south; Melrose Avenue on the north. Rossmore and Wilshire Country Club marking the west border, a demarcation line between money and only the dream of it. Western Avenue and its profusion of bars and liquor stores standing sentry at the east gate — keeping undesirable school districts, Mexicans and homosexuals at bay. Six blocks from north to south; seventeen from east to west. Small wood-frame and Spanish-style houses; tree-lined streets without stoplights. A courtyard apartment building rumored to be filled with prostitutes and illegal aliens; an elementary school; the debatable presence of a “fuck pad” where U.S.C. football players brought girls to watch ’50’s-vintage porno films. A small universe of secrets.

  I lived with my father and mother in a salmon-colored miniature of the Santa Barbara Mission, two stories with a tar-paper roof and a mock mission bell. My father worked as a draftsman at an airplane plant and gambled cautiously — he usually won. My mother clerked at an insurance company and spent her leisure hours staring at traffic on Beverly Boulevard.

  I realize now that both my parents had furious, and furiously separate, mental lives. They were together for the first seven years of my life, and early on I remember designating them as my custodians and nothing else. Their lack of affection, to me and to each other, registered inchoately as freedom — dimly I perceived their elliptical approach to parenthood as a neglect that I could capitalize on. They did not possess the passion to abuse me or to love me. I know today that they armed me with the equivalant of enough childhood brutality to fuel an army.

  Early in 1953, the air-raid sirens stationed throughout the neighborhood went off accidentally, and my father, convinced that a Russian A-bomb attack was imminent, led my mother and me up to the roof to await the arrival of the Big One. He brought a fifth of bourbon with him, because he wanted to toast the mushroom cloud he expected to rise over downtown L.A., and when the Big One never appeared, he was drunk and disappointed. My mother made one of her rare verbal offerings, this one to allay her husband’s depression over the world not being blown to hell. He raised his hand to hit her, then hesitated and slugged down the rest of the bottle. Mother went downstairs to her traffic-watching chair, and I started checking science books out of the library. I wanted to see what mushroom clouds looked like.

  That night signaled the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. The air-raid scare created a bomb-shelter boom in the neighborhood, and my father, disgusted by the backyard construction, took to spending his weekends on the roof, drinking and observing the spectacle. I watched him get angrier and angrier, and I wanted to ease his pain, make him less of a pent-up observer. Somehow I got the notion to give him the “Wham-O” stainless steel slingshot I had found on a bus bench at Oakwood and Western.

  My father loved the gift, and took to shooting ball hearings at the above-ground sections of the shelters. Soon his aim became excellent, and seeking more challenging targets, he started assassinating the crows who perched on the telephone wires that ran along the alley in back of our house. Once he even caught a scurrying rat from forty-six feet and eight inches away. I recall the distance because my father, proud of the feat, paced it off in yards, then calibrated the remainder with a metal drafting rule.

  Early in ’54, I learned that my parents were going to get divorced. My father took me up to the roof to tell me. I had seen it coming, and knew from the “Paul Coates Confidential” T.V. program that many “Post war marriages” were headed for Splitsvilie.

  “Why?” I asked.

  My father toed the gravel on the roof; it looked like he was tracing A-bomb clouds. “Well... I’m thirty-four years old, and your mother and I don’t get along; and if I give her much more time I’ll have shot my good years; and if I do that I might as well pack it in. We can’t let that happen, can we?”

  “No.”

  “That’s my Marty. I’ll be moving to Michigan, but you and your mother will keep the house, and I’ll be writing to you, and I’ll be sending money.”

  I knew from the Coates show that divorce was an expensive proposition, and sensed that my father must have had a big stash of gambling money put away to facilitate his move to Splitsvilie. He seemed to pick up my thoughts and added, “You’ll be well looked after, don’t you worry about that.”

  “I won’t worry.”

  “Good.” My father took a finger sight on a fat bluejay sitting atop our next-door neighbor’s garage. “You know your mother is, well... you know.”

  I wanted to scream “nutty,” “crazy,” “fruitcake” and “couch case,” but didn’t want him to know I knew. “She’s sensitive?” I ventured.

&
nbsp; My father shook his head slowly; I knew he knew I knew. “Yeah, sensitive. Just try to take her with a grain of salt. Get a good education and try to be your own man, and you’ll make yourself heard from.”

  On that prophetic note, my father stuck out his hand. We shook, and five minutes later he walked out the door. I never saw him again.

  3

  All my mother required was that I maintain a reasonable degree of silence and not burden her with questions about what she was thinking, Implicit in that was her desire for me to remain moderate in school, at play and at home. If she considered the dictate to be punishment, she was wrong: I could go anywhere I wanted in my head.

  Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I went to Van Ness Avenue Elementary, obeyed, and laughed and hurt at silly things. But other children found their hurt/joy in outside stimuli, while I found mine reflected off a movie screen that fed from what surrounded me, edited for my own inside-the-brain viewing by a steel-sharp mental device that always knew exactly what I needed to keep from being bored.

  The screenings ran this way:

  Miss Conlan or Miss Gladstone would be standing by the blackboard, unctuously proclaiming. They would start to fade visually commensurate with my growing boredom, and involuntarily, my eyes would start to trawl for something to keep me mentally awake.

  The taller children were seated at the back of the room, and from my far left-hand corner desk I had a perfect forward/diagonal viewing path, one that allowed me profile shots of all my classmates. With teacher sight/noise reduced to a minimum, the faces of the other children blurred together, forming new ones; snatches of whispered conversations came together until all manner of boy/girl hybrids were declaring their devotion to me.