Silent terror, p.26
Silent Terror, page 26
Municipal police departments in at least four states are building cases against Plunkett. The Aspen, Colorado, authorities suspect him of eight murder/disappearances in 1975 and 1976, and Utah, Nevada and Kansas police officials suspect him of another fifteen to twenty within their jurisdictions.
Inspector Dusenberry said last week: “I’ve shared my Plunkett data with every department that’s requested it. They deserve to know what we have. But prosecutors are getting indictment-happy, and it’s ridiculous. Without a confession from Plunkett, it’s all just too cold. No witnesses. No evidence. I’ve talked to two men Plunkett sold murder victims’ credit cards to years ago. They couldn’t make a positive ID based on his current appearance. It’s all too old and too vague, and, at bottom, it’s motivated by outrage and personal ambition. Plunkett is going to be convicted in a non-death penalty state, and no New York judge is going to let him be extradited elsewhere and executed, as much as he deserves it, and as much as a lot of hungry D.A.’s would love to fix it up.”
As for the Anderson case, the former policeman is set to go to trial next week in Wisconsin. He pleaded guilty at his arraignment, and is expected to receive the maximum sentence Wisconsin state law allows: three consecutive life terms. Anderson has admitted raping and killing women in four other states (two of them with the death penalty), and prosecutors in Kentucky, Iowa, South Carolina and Maryland are seeking legal loopholes to gain indictment warrants on.
Anderson himself has remained quiet about his crimes and his relationship with Plunkett, offering “no comment” through his attorney when queried by out-of-state police officials and district attorneys. “It’s all in their hands,” Inspector Dusenberry has said. “If one of them wants to talk, lots of people, including me, will be all ears.”
From the Milwaukee Post, February 12, 1984:
ANDERSON CONVICTED; GETS LIFE
Ross Anderson, the former Wisconsin State Police lieutenant who was also the killer known as the “Wisconsin Whipsaw” was convicted of the 1978–1979 rape-murders of Gretchen Weymouth, Mary Coontz and Claire Kozol in a brief trial held yesterday in Beloit District Court. Judge Harold Kirsch sentenced Anderson, 33, to three consecutive life terms without possibility of parole, directing that he be placed in an institution offering “full protective custody” — a term used to denote maximum security prisons that have special facilities for “high visibility” offenders, i.e., former police officers, celebrities and organized-crime figures who might be subject to attack if housed among the general inmate population.
After the verdict was handed down, Beloit D.A. Roger Mizrahi told reporters: “It’s a disgrace. Three Wisconsin girls dead, and their killer spends the rest of his life playing golf at a country-club slammer.”
From the editorial page of the Milwaukee Journal, March 3, 1984:
THE WAGES OF MURDER?
Ross Anderson murdered seven people. His friend Martin Plunkett murdered at least four people, and some policemen familiar with his case say without hesitation that his number of victims ends at about fifty. Both “men” had the good fortune to be convicted in states that do not allow capital punishment, and both men are such heinous criminals that they cannot be allowed to live with other criminals — for even hardened robbers and drug dealers would be so outraged by their presence on the prison yard that their safety would be jeopardized.
So Ross Anderson, aka “Wisconsin Whipsaw” and “Four-State Hooker Hacker,” languishes in a special protective custody facility, lifting weights, reading science-fiction novels and building expensive balsa-wood airplanes. The prisoner in the cell next to his is Salvatore DiStefano, the Cleveland Mafia underboss serving fifteen years on Racketeering charges. He and Anderson talk baseball through the bars for hours each day.
Martin Plunkett resides at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He talks to no one, but is rumored to be considering writing his memoirs. He corresponds with various New York literary agents, all of whom are eager to peddle any book he writes. Offers from Hollywood — rumor has it that some studios have offered him as much as fifty thousand dollars for a twenty-page outline of his life — abound. Fifty thousand dollars divided by fifty victims comes down to a thousand dollars per head.
That’s obscene.
Plunkett wouldn’t be able to keep the money; New York State law prohibits convicted criminals from reaping the financial rewards of published or filmed accounts of their crimes, and Plunkett probably wouldn’t care — since his arrest he has brilliantly manipulated the legal and media establishments into waiting for him to tell his story his way. It is all he seems to want, and both well-intentioned legal people and literary voyeurs are drooling with anticipation.
It’s all obscene, and inimical to the American concepts of blind justice and punishment to fit the crime. It’s all obscene and points out the perfidies of free speech carried to the extreme of license. It’s all obscene and points to the need for a National Death Penalty Statute.
From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary.
6/13/84
It’s now nine months since I took Anderson and Plunkett off the streets. I’ve been busy with work — new links and chains — and with trying to reconstruct the two of them. Nothing’s coming together with the former, and with the latter it’s all coming bad.
Updating: Buckford was the brains behind prosecuting Plunkett. He built up a backlog of witnesses that never had to be tapped because of Plunkett’s statement, and he laid down attack strategies for the lackluster Westchester D.A. He’s got a big ace in the hole in the event other states ever secure extradition warrants: a series of Interstate Flight charges waiting, guaranteed to keep him in the limelight and Plunkett out of the chair. I feel ambivalent about the man and his machinations. He knows, and I know, that capital punishment is not a deterrent to violent crime, and the Southhampton aristocrat in h m considers it vulgar. Fine, but he’s also a comer in the Democratic Party, with a high-visibility racketeering strike-force job in the works, and he’s looking to keep his liberal credentials untarnished for a Senate shot somewhere down the line. He’s told me, and a half-dozen other agents, “America runs hot-cold, yin-yang, right-left, and the next time it hangs a left turn, I’ll be there to hop on and make hay.”
So Bucky Buckford’s an opportunist, and I would be too, if I weren’t so depressed. After the Anderson/Plunkett busts, I got a congratulatory telegram from the Director himself. He called my work “magnificent,” and ended the telegram with a question: “Are you staying on active duty until the maximum retirement age?” In my reply I was noncommittal, even though the question was a veiled offer of an Assistant Directorship and maybe command of the entire Criminal Division.
Here’s what all this ambivalence and depression is about:
I want to see Plunkett dead.
Anderson doesn’t bother me like Plunkett does — he actually wept when we told him two of his cousins had been murdered. But Plunkett can’t feel that, or feel anything past his own intransigence. I feel like justifying myself here, so I will. I’m not a vindictive man, I’m not a far-right ideologue, I can separate the need for justice from the lust for vengeance. And I’m not besieged by irrational guilt over not putting the Croton house under surveillance — I believed Anderson when he told me he hadn’t seen Plunkett since ’79. I still want Plunkett dead. I want him dead because he will never feel remorse or guilt or a moment’s pain or ambivalence regarding the grief he has caused, and because he is now preparing to write his life story, bankrolled by a literary agent who will be the conduit for official police documents to help him tell it, I want him dead because he is exploiting what I most believe in order to sate his own ego. I want him dead because now I don’t wonder why anymore — I just know. Evil exists.
About a month before Plunkett’s trial, Bucky Buckford and I had a confab with the Director. He told me I looked stressed out, and ordered me to take a vacation leave. Carol couldn’t go because of her classes, so I went alone. Where did I go? Janesville, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles, where Anderson and Plunkett grew up. What did I learn? Nothing except what is is, and evil exists.
I talked to about forty people who knew them. Anderson coerced younger boys into homosexual acts and tortured animals when he was a teenager. Plunkett prowled around his neighborhood looking in windows. The marijuana trafficker Anderson shot and killed in the line of duty was an old friend turned enemy, and I’m certain it was premeditated. Plunkett’s first killing almost certainly took place in San Francisco in ’74 — he was F.I. carded by the S.F.P.D. three days after a man and woman living across the street from him were ax-murdered. Checking over their school records, I found the all-American boy and a strange boy with a big brain, but no mention of anything like pivotal, life-forming trauma. Coming home, I got drunk on the plane and toasted the Dutch Reformed Church. Evil exists, prepackaged at birth, predestined) in the womb. If Plunkett and Anderson are, as Doc Seidman suggests, sadistic homosexuals, then their passion is based not on love, but on evil recognizing fellow evil. Mom, Dad, Reverend Hilliker, John Calvin, you were right. Reluctantly I salute you.
Getting home, still half in the bag, I did something I’ve never done in twenty-four years of marriage. I prowled around in Carol’s dresser. When I saw that her diaphragm wasn’t in its case, I started throwing things. After I sobered up a bit, I picked them up, and Carol came home. She didn’t say a word and I didn’t ask a thing, and lately she’s been so sweet and attentive that I still can’t say a thing. Something has to happen with her soon, but I’m afraid that if I make the first move, I’ll blow us out of the water.
Some final thoughts on Plunkett:
Sometimes I think the only thing good to come out of what he has taught me is a resolve to continue seeing evil as what it is. If my destiny is to become a prototypical hardball homicide cop, so be it. If the cost to my personal life is great, so be it. If Plunkett was a directional pointer from God, a prepackaged villain to keep me taking out killers, so be it. If the above is true, then I can reconcile the logical and methodical part of me with the new mystical and disillusioned part and move on.
The only thing about it that doesn’t float is me. I’m almost fifty years old, and I doubt if I’ve got the energy to make myself cold and hard and driven. That’s a young man’s game — and Plunkett’s.
27
June 15, 1984.
I was lying on my bunk when I heard movement on the catwalk in front of my cell. Thinking it was just another guard or administrator curious to see the silent killer in the flesh, I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Then I smelled alcohol, looked over and saw Dusenberry gripping the bars. “Talk to me,” he said.
I decided not to. I had broken my silence in the course of retaining my literary agent, and had spoken to key Sing Sing administrators along with him, but my F.B.I. pursuer drunk at two in the afternoon wasn’t worthy of repartee. I looked back at the ceiling and began brain-screening colors.
“Did you pork Anderson or did he pork you?”
The swirls I was seeing were soft pink and beige.
“Probably the latter. They’re out to get you, boy. Ronnie’s got the Supreme Court packed with hardballs, Colorado’s got a whole team of legal hotshots looking into ways to fry your ass.”
Dark tan and red now, blending softly.
“If you fry, you’ll never get to write your book. You’ll be forgotten.”
Tan and red into blue, deepening.
“Look at me, you fuck!”
Still deepening, the colors slowly separating, returning to their original shades, only prettier.
“I’ll never let you make me like you!”
Deeper, softer, prettier.
“Never, never, you fuck! Never be shit like you!”
Softer, prettier still as I heard the guards come and take Dusenberry away.
From Thomas Dusenberry’s diary:
6/19/84
What happened with Plunkett got back to the Director. He sent a reprimand via Bucky Buckford — Don’t let it or anything like it happen again. Bucky advises a very low profile and some quick, spectacular results at the Task Force, even if I have to steal the credit from another agent. I can’t do that, of course; it’s too Plunkett-pragmatic.
I had it out with Carol last night. She admitted having an affair with one of her professors. I was calm until she started rationalizing why it happened. She had logical reasons for all of it, and when she started ticking them off, I hit her. She cried and I cried, and ten minutes later she’s logical and rational again, telling me, “Tom, we can’t go on like this.”
I knew it before she did.
Some good news, if you can call it that: Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus, the Minneapolis child scalper, was shot and killed crossing the Mexican border into Texas yesterday. A border patrolman recognized him and went for his gun, and Anzerhaus reached for something under the seat. Thinking it was a weapon, the officer shot him. It wasn’t a gun. It was a stuffed panda bear. Anzerhaus died cradling it like a baby.
I called Jim Schwartzwalder and gave him the news. He broke down, then his wife came to the phone and I repeated the story, asking her why Jim took it so hard. She said, “You don’t want to know.”
She’s right, I don’t.
What I do want to know is that someone decent can profit from my stalemate with Plunkett. Once I figure it out, and know it, I’ll cut the evil bastard loose forever.
From the New York Times, June 24, 1984:
HEAD OF PLUNKETT-ANDERSON INVESTIGATION FOUND DEAD NEAR HOME; SUICIDE RULED
Quantico, Virginia, June 23:
Thomas D. Dusenberry, 49, the F.B.I. inspector who served as head of the Bureau’s Serial Killer Task Force and the agent responsible for the captures of multiple murderers Martin Plunkett and Ross Anderson, was found dead in the woods near his Quantico home yesterday. A .38-caliber revolver with a crudely made silencer attached was in his right hand, and there was a single bullet wound in his head. Investigating officers found a suicide note in Dusenberry’s handwriting on his dining room table, and the death has been officially certified as “self-inflicted homicide.”
F.B.I. officials expressed shock at Dusenberry’s death, but offered no speculation as to why he took his own life. Quantico police revealed that along with the suicide note there were two checks for twenty-five thousand dollars each, made out by Dusenberry to his son and daughter. Dusenberry had told a colleague, Special Agent James Schwartzwalder, that he had sold a diary he had kept on the Plunkett case to a literary agent representing Martin Plunkett in the sale of his autobiography — for the amount of money he left his children.
“Tom told me about the deal three days ago,” Agent Schwartzwalder told the Times. “He seemed happy about it. I had no idea what he was planning.”
Dusenberry will be buried in a Dutch Reformed Church service next week. He is survived by his wife, Carol, 45; his son, Mark, 22; and his daughter, Susan, 23.
28
Save for this epilogue, my story is complete. I have been at Sing Sing for fourteen months; Dusenberry has been dead for nine. No extradition warrants have been filed on me, and there are sixty-two pins stuck in the map adorning my cell wall. I was thirty-seven yesterday.
Milton Alpert is reading the first pages of my manuscript in a cell directly across the catwalk from me. I have been observing him for an hour, and he looks frightened.
It’s over now. I’m as dead and inanimate as the red-topped pins in my map. Looking back over these four-hundred-odd pages, I see that I was, by turns, frightened and enraged, bold and cowardly, vicious and possessed of a warrior’s noblesse oblige. I fought and fled, and when I loved, my empathy was sparked by a will to power similar to my own. That he proved weak and traitorous is of no import; like all human beings, I cleaved to a comely lover who filled in my own blank spaces with grace, relinquishing parts of my will in sighs and embraces. Unlike most human beings, I did not let my desire destroy me. My last killings were for him, and I almost spared my final victim for him in a split-second’s clarity, but in the end my will remained intact. I possessed the experience, but did not pay the ultimate price.
Others paid that price for me
Taking their lives, I knew them in their most exquisite moments of existence. Cutting them down young, ardent and healthy, I assimilated brashness and sex that would have gone timid had I not usurped it for my own use. Part of it was to kill my nightmares and staunch my awful rage, and part of t was for the sheer thrill and high-voltage sense of power that murder gave me. I cannot summarize my drives in any greater perspective than that.
So you look for cause and effect; you partake of my brilliant memory and absolute candor and conclude what you will. Build mountains out of ellipses and bastions of logic from interpretations of the truth I have given you. And if I have gamed your credibility by portraying myself honestly, frailties and all, then believe me when I tell you this: I have been to points of power and lucidity that cannot be measured by anything logical or mystical or human. Such was the sanctity of my madness.
It’s over now. I will not submit to the duration of my sentence. With this valediction in blood completed, my transit in human form has peaked, and to subsist past it is unacceptable. Scientists say that all matter disperses into unrecognizable but pervasive energy. I intend to find out, by turning myself inward and shutting down my senses until I implode into a space beyond all laws, all roadways, all speed limits. In some dark form, I will continue.
