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Each body is a piece of a larger puzzle.
Ella didn’t know exactly what this meant, but she could glean one thing: their unsub did not subscribe to the belief that these murders were isolated incidents.
Did he believe that the same person had committed the murders he was mimicking? It couldn’t be, because firstly, it meant the killer would have been active for 50 years, and secondly, Tobias Campbell was sentenced for the last murder in the series. Tobias certainly wasn’t responsible for the murders of Cheri Jo Bates and Elizabeth Short, because he wasn’t even born when they were killed.
Therefore, it meant something else. He believed he knew who was responsible for these deaths, but how could he?
She hadn’t considered the idea until the letter had arrived, because this incident had reminded her of the Zodiac killer. The man who terrorized California in the 1960s and 1970s.
California. That was the clue that got her mind racing.
But that was as far as her thought process had elapsed. In her mind, she saw a gleaming steel door bursting at the seams, and once it shot open, it would reveal all the connections in a neat little pattern.
She just needed to find the key.
The killer’s first murder was simple, straightforward. A knife attack. He then mimicked an obscure murder from the 1960s via a particular wound pattern.
What else? Was there anything else that stood out?
Ella thought back to the body, the crime scene photos, the autopsy.
Then she threw her knowledge of the Zodiac killer into the mix.
The coroner had said: she was clothed when we found her, and there was a little square section missing out of her top. That’s the only other anomaly.
“Oh crap,” Ella said to herself. “No, calm down. We’re not there yet. It could be nothing.”
She adjusted her eyes to the vast landscape and composed herself. Don’t get ahead of yourself, that was the rule. If she went back to Ripley with such a flimsy theory, she’d bite her head off.
Then there was Eliza Matthews, the Black Dahlia copycat murder. Indeed, everything had been present, including the two main components: the bisection and the Glasgow smile. There was no doubt that the killer was mimicking that exact crime, but what anomalies were present? Transposing the idea of the Zodiac and Cheri Jo Bates, was there a similar pattern that fit over the Black Dahlia murder too?
Ella racked her brain, imagining herself walking through the 1940s, year-by-year, visiting different states and towns and murder capitals. She pictured old black and white crime scene photos, any that might involve bisection, mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation.
She shut her eyes, and when she opened them she was suddenly in Cleveland, Ohio. It was 1949, two years after the Black Dahlia had been killed. A little shanty town called Kingsbury Run with a population of a few hundred, many of whom were homeless, and the homeless made great murder victims. She had to double-check herself to make sure she wasn’t just imagining what she wanted to imagine.
No. She was recalling true facts, real events, a gem from the back of her brain that she’d had stored away for over a decade. They called him the Mad Butcher and he terrorized Ohio in the late 1940s.
In her mind, she saw a mass grave of defiled corpses. Severed limbs, decapitated heads, lacerated torsos.
The M.O.s didn’t match. Not by a long shot. But her opinion didn’t matter. What mattered was the beliefs of the deranged psychopath she was chasing through Hicksberg. If he believed it, then she had to entertain it.
“Oh, shit,” she shouted. Ella hated to curse, but sometimes no other words could do the job. “Christ, but how does he know that? That was kept from public record?” she asked herself.
But stopped herself again. Two down. Two connections.
One more.
And as hard as she thought about it. It didn’t fit at all. Tobias Campbell’s crimes did not match this pattern.
In the first murder, he’d referenced an unsolved murder and a famous serial killer.
In the second murder, he’d referenced an unsolved murder and another famous serial killer.
In the third murder, he’d only referenced a famous serial killer.
Ella backtracked, following the series of events linearly. He’d abducted a woman, taken her to a field and hanged her from a tree. There were bruises on the victim’s back and arms according to today’s autopsy report, which meant the killer manhandled the victim.
Tobias hadn’t done this. He simply talked the victims into committing suicide.
