Tag Archives: True Crime

THE BOSTON STRANGLER—WAS IT REALLY ALBERT DESALVO?

The Boston Strangler was America’s first modern serial killer case. From June 1962 until January 1964, someone terrorized the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts with thirteen sexually motivated murders. Single women of all ages were raped, sadistically brutalized, and strangled to death inside their apartments. Apparently, they voluntarily let their killer in.

The slaying string suddenly stopped. No one was apprehended, charged, or convicted. For years, the Boston Strangler serial murders remained unsolved. The files—whatever was left of them—sat shelved with other cold cases. Day-by-day, the trail got icier. That’s until modern forensic science revisited the evidence using cutting-edge, DNA genotyping.

Authorities long debated whether Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. He was a serial sexual predator and certainly capable of strangling women while raping them. In fact, Albert DeSalvo admitted being the Strangler and claimed responsibility for the thirteen cases, plus other homicides. But, DeSalvo also recanted his confession, blamed others and many pieces implicating him didn’t fit.

Boston area detectives didn’t have Albert DeSalvo on their radar during the early investigation. It wasn’t until late 1965 that DeSalvo surfaced after making a jail-house confession to a cellmate who happened to be represented by high-profile lawyer F. Lee Bailey. Bailey took on DeSalvo’s case and tried to broker a deal with Boston Police and the D.A. It was having Albert DeSalvo ruled criminally insane so he could move from the harsh penitentiary to a comfortable hospital.

The police were very cautious about credibility in DeSalvo’s confession. There was absolutely no physical evidence—at the time—to connect Albert DeSalvo to any of the Strangler scenes. DeSalvo was well known for exaggerating and fabricating stories. Further, DeSalvo seemed wrong about some Strangler scene key facts such as times, mechanisms of death and various evidence points. It seemed to investigators that DeSalvo could have got his information from the news, made some up, or possibly heard it in jail from the real killer.

Albert DeSalvo was written off as a braggart and a pathological attention seeker. He was never charged for the Boston Strangler murders and died in prison in 1973 after being shanked by fellow inmates. The Strangler case sat dormant until 2013 when the Boston PD got special cold case funding from the National Justice Institute. With it, they assembled a team and applied DNA analysis from questioned male biological evidence retrieved at one Strangler death scene and compared it with known DNA extracted from DeSalvo’s exhumed body. The results finally settled the question, “The Boston Strangler—Was it really Albert DeSalvo?”

Boston Strangler Case History

The killings associated with the Boston Strangler serial murder case happened over a 19-month period from the summer of 1962 until the winter of 1964. All victims were females alone in apartments who were killed by manual or ligature strangulation. Some were also stabbed. All were sexually violated in some manner, and most had their nylon stockings cinched around their necks. However, there were marked differences in modus operandi (MO) between the killings. There was also a huge age range. The youngest Strangler-attributed victim was 19. The oldest was 85. Initially, the Strangler case was called the “Silk Stocking Murders”. This label changed when the Boston Sunday Herald ran the July 8, 1962, headline “Mad Strangler Kills Four Women in Boston” after the fourth victim was found. Then, a panic surge swept Boston causing women to arm themselves, buy guard dogs, and rig alarms in their homes.

The print, radio, and TV media industry didn’t help calm peoples’ fears. They sensationalized the Boston Strangler case as Boston’s crime of the century. Interest intensified as the Strangler’s body count grew. Through good investigative journalism and helpful leaks from police officers, much of the Strangler key-fact evidence got published.

Normally, this critical information—only known to the true killer and the principal investigators—would be held back in strictest confidence. Not so with many of the individual Strangler murders. Descriptions of exact ligatures, body posings in lurid sexual positions, and notes allegedly left by the killer appeared in newspapers and on the air.

Another challenge was the multi-jurisdictional overlap in the Greater Boston police departments. Strangler victims surfaced in Cambridge, Salem, Lynn, and Lawrence as well as central Boston. This was the sixties and way before modern communication links in law enforcement. The media had better information channels than the cops and were making case links that seasoned detectives doubted.

The sixties weren’t sophisticated times as forensics and informatics go. But the Boston detectives were no strangers to murders and were well-equipped with gut sense. The wide gap in victim ages, race, social class, crime scene modus operandi and event spacing puzzled the initial investigators. There were so many different patterns that it was hard to believe that, behaviorally, the crimes were committed by one person.

Many officers still believe that today. They feel that more than one killer was at work in the Boston area during that period and to seasoned officers, that makes sense. However, there was one obvious common denominator in all thirteen murders. Not a single scene had any sign of forced entry. Somehow, the killer had to have been let in.

The Boston Strangler Victims

Initially, the Boston Strangler victim list held fifteen names. After a time, two cases were solved and found to be independent perpetrators. The police also proved these assailants were not connected to the unsolved cases they cautiously suspected were the Strangler’s work. Here is the list of victims historically associated with the Boston Strangler.

  1. Anna Slesers – age 56. Found: June 14, 1962, at 77 Gainsborough St., Back Bay, Boston MA. MO: Sexually assaulted with unspecified foreign object. Non-fatally strangled with a belt then fatally strangled with bathrobe cord tied in a bow around neck.
  2. Mary Mullen – age 85. Found: June 28, 1962, at 1435 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA. MO: Sexual assault in progress but died of heart attack during strangulation attempt.
  3. Nina Nichols – age 68. Found: June 30, 1962, at 1940 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA. MO: Sexually assaulted with a wine bottle. Fatal ligature strangulation with one nylon stocking. Two more postmortem nylon stockings tied around neck in a bow.
  4. Helen Blake – age 65. Found: June 30, 1962, at 73 Newhall St., Lynn MA. MO: Raped and fatally strangled with nylon stockings. Another nylon and bra tied around neck postmortem.
  5. Ida Irga – age 75. Found: August 19, 1962, at 7 Grove St., Beacon Hill, Boston MA. MO: Raped and manually strangled. Pillowcase around neck postmortem.
  6. Jane Sullivan – age 67. Found: August 21, 1962, at 435 Columbia Rd., Dorchester, South Boston, MA. MO: Raped and fatally strangled with nylon stockings.
  7. Sophie Clark – age 20. Found: December 5, 1962, at 315 Huntington Ave., Back Bay, Boston MA. MO: Raped and fatally strangled with nylon stockings. Petticoat wrapped around neck postmortem.
  8. Patricia Bissette – age 23. Found: December 31, 1962, at 515 Park Drive, Back Bay, Boston MA. MO: Raped and fatally strangled with interwoven nylon stockings. Blouse also tied around neck postmortem.
  9. Mary Brown – age 69. Found: March 6, 1963, at 319 Park Ave., Lawrence MA. MO: Raped, bludgeoned with a pipe, stabbed in breasts with fork, and manually strangled. No ligature involved.
  10. Beverly Samans – age 23. Found: May 6, 1963, at 4 University Rd., Cambridge MA. MO: Raped, stabbed four times in neck, twenty-two times in torso. Two scarves and one nylon stocking tied around neck postmortem.
  11. Evelyn Corben – age 58. Found: September 6, 1963, at 224 Lafayette St., Salem MA. MO: Raped, forced to perform oral sex and fatally strangled with two nylon stockings.
  12. Joann Graff – age 23. Found: November 23, 1963, at 54 Essex St., Lawrence MA. MO: Raped, beaten and fatally strangled with nylon stockings. Black leotard wrapped around neck postmortem.
  13. Mary Sullivan – age 19. Found January 4, 1964, at 44-A Charles St., Boston MA. MO: Sexually assaulted with broom handle, forced to perform oral sex, fatally strangled with nylon stocking. Two scarves tied around neck postmortem. Posed on bed with back against wall, legs spread, and hand-written sign placed at feet reading “Happy New Year”.

How Albert DeSalvo Surfaced

Hindsight is a marvelous thing. Many police and forensic investigators wish they were issued it when they started their careers. Hindsight may be 20/20, but that’s not the real world in active, fluid police and forensic worlds.

Analyzing modus operandi, or method of operation, is also a marvelous thing. In hindsight, the Boston Strangler’s MOs appear glaringly obvious. But it’s just not that clear for field investigators on the ground. These professionals had to do the best with what they had at the time. Usually that’s a name and they didn’t have Albert DeSalvo’s as a murder suspect.

Looking back, Albert DeSalvo was proficiently active across the crime spectrum. DeSalvo was a con-man duping people on scams. He boosted cars and broke into businesses. DeSalvo dealt drugs and fenced goods. But what Albert DeSalvo was really good at was scamming innocent people into letting him enter their homes.

Before the Boston Strangler case started, Boston police were baffled by sexual predators called the “Measuring Man” and the “Green Man”. They appeared to be two different entities because of two different MOs. Both behaviors were far from how the Boston Strangler operated.

The Measuring Man started his Boston business in 1960. He was a clean, well-dressed and cheery man who randomly appeared at single ladies apartment doors, confidently portraying himself as a modeling agency rep. The ruse was the lady had been recommended by her anonymous friend to be a model. The Measuring Man was asked in, took critical bust, waist and hip sizes and was never seen again.

The Green Man was more aggressive. He appeared at single women’s apartments dressed in green work clothes. His ruse was repairs, and he was let in to do his job. That turned out to be raping women but leaving them alive. Most gave a very good description, and one victim later led the police to Albert DeSalvo.

Boston police arrested Albert DeSalvo for the Green Man rapes on October 27, 1964. This was eight months after the last Boston Strangler murder. Based on DeSalvos description and distinct Green Man MO, they charged him with multiple counts of rape and related sexual assaults. DeSalvo was held in custody and remanded for a psychiatric assessment. It was the same place and time holding George Nassar.

Albert DeSalvo Meets George Nassar

George Nassar was a violent Boston area criminal. Nassar was also in psychiatric remand for cold-bloodedly killing a gas station attendant during a robbery. He was already convicted of a previous murder. They wrote the penal code for guys like George Nassar, and he’d already checked off most of the boxes.

Somehow, Albert DeSalvo and George Nassar were cell mates. No one except Nassar knows how the conversation started. He’s still alive, but not talking. However, back then, the increasingly high-profile American defense attorney F. Lee Bailey represented George Nassar. Though Nassar and Bailey—Albert DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

F Lee Bailey (front)

This toxic mix of masterful manipulators gave Boston police investigators the willies. Nassar was known as a cruel murderer with sexual deviancy. Bailey was an up-and-coming publicity hound. And Albert DeSalvo had absolutely no priors for anything indicating murder.

Lee Bailey (later famous for clients like Sam Sheppard, Patty Hearst, and OJ Simpson) recorded 50 hours of interviews with DeSalvo producing 20,000 transcript pages. Bailey remained the middleman, and the police never talked to DeSalvo directly.

Boston and other PD detectives carefully analyzed Albert DeSalvo’s statements. They concluded that DeSalvo got may details wrong about the crime scenes, particularly times of death that contradicted autopsy evidence. They also concluded details DeSalvo got right—certain key fact information—could well have come from another capable criminal like George Nassar.

DeSalvo suddenly recanted his confession. Police suspected a ruse between Nassar and DeSalvo to split a reward and get preferred incarceration facilities. DeSalvo was already facing life imprisonment, and Nassar had an appeal shot. Police also mistrusted F. Lee Baily and for a good reason, given Bailey’s track record. Eventually, Bailey goes home. DeSalvo dies. Nassar does life. And the Boston Strangler serial killings go unsolved.

Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo’s Families Join Forces

This might sound like an unlikely joint venture, but the families of Mary Sullivan—13th on the Strangler list—and Albert DeSalvo joined forces to exonerate him. Both families had agendas. DeSalvo’s family wanted his name cleared as the Boston Strangler and Sullivan’s family long suspected a copycat—an associate of Mary Sullivan’s roommate.

The Sullivans and DeSalvos did a private investigation in 2000. The Boston police and other law enforcement agencies weren’t involved. Because both families had next-of-kin and executor powers, they convinced the medical examiner to exhume Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo’s bodies for DNA examination.

Their goal was to isolate the killer’s DNA profile on Mary Sullivan’s remains and a known DNA profile from DeSalvo’s remains. Theoretically, this would link or exonerate the two. This was despite Mary Sullivan decomposing for 36 years and Albert DeSalvo rotting for 27.

They exhumed Mary Sullivan on October 13/14, 2000, from her grave in Hyannis MA. The forensic report of her disinterment and forensic examination is fascinating for the forensically inclined. Foreign DNA signatures developed on what was left of Sullivan’s underwear, pubic hair and head hair. They produced two separate donor profiles through degraded mitochondrial DNA profiling. The question was, “Were they contributed by Albert DeSalvo?”

The DeSalvo family authorized the Medical Examiner to exhume Albert’s body. The private team isolated suitable material and developed a unique DNA profile for Albert DeSalvo. When compared, the foreign DNA on Mary Sullivan clearly wasn’t contributed by Albert DeSalvo. Albert DeSalvo seemed innocent.

For the next 13 years, both families and many others were convinced Albert DeSalvo didn’t murder Mary Sullivan. That wasn’t so with the Boston police who still held the original semen swabs and slides from Mary Sullivan’s autopsy. They were waiting for forensic science to catch up so degraded DNA could be positively processed.

Boston Police Examine Strangler DNA in 2013

Boston and other police departments had no involvement in the 2000 private exhumations and DNA analysis. Neither did the Medical Examiner’s office or District Attorney. They let a privately-funded—and expensive—venture play out and let the private conclusions stand for what they were worth.

The authorities are no fools. They analyzed the private process flaws and waited till technology advanced. By 2013, forensic DNA analysis had three decades under its belt and was far more precise on old, degraded serology swabs and slides like those still retained from Mary Sullivan’s autopsy in 1964.

Two forensic labs worked tandemly to profile mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the foreign, or questioned, semen samples taken at Sullivan’s postmortem. They produced a clear biological picture of her killer. Now, the forensic team needed a known sample from suspects.

For years, Albert DeSalvo was the leading Boston Strangler suspect. Certainly, individual investigators had their personal opinions. But the preponderance of evidence pointed to DeSalvo and the overall modus operandi pointed to all thirteen murders being related.

Now the Boston police and the forensic team needed a known sample from their prime suspect—Albert DeSalvo. The problem was, DeSalvo was dead. Unlike the NOK/family loop that allowed exhumation, the cops had to convince a judge to issue a search warrant.

Again, the authorities are no fools. They needed a live link to the dead for an indicative DNA donor. That lay in a living male relative of Albert DeSalvo and, by now, the cooperative ones had dropped off. The closest living DeSalvo was a nephew. He wasn’t cooperating.

So, the Boston PD did a sting where they surveilled the nephew until he discarded a plastic water bottle. From that, the forensics team developed a Y-Chromosome DNA profile that showed that someone from the DeSalvo male lineage was 99.9% likely to be Sullivan’s foreign sperm donor. This powerful biological indicator provided grounds for a second Albert DeSalvo exhumation, authorized by a court warrant. Direct nuclear DNA from Albert DeSalvo was crucial to precisely proving or disproving the connection.

On July 10, 2013, Boston police and their forensic team once again dug up Albert DeSalvo and extracted DNA from his femur and three teeth. Nine days later, the Boston PD chief, the local DA and the Massachusetts Attorney General jointly announced that Albert DeSalvo’s DNA matched Mary Sullivan’s sperm donor with odds of one in 220 billion of being wrong.

It follows that if Albert DeSalvo’s semen DNA match conclusively links him as Sulivan’s killer, then the intricate MO—the nylon stocking nexus—connects DeSalvo to all thirteen killings. That evidence combination is the holy grail in a serial killer investigation, and there is no doubt—no doubt whatsoever—that the Boston Strangler really was Albert DeSalvo.

DR. DEATH—THE KILLER SURGEON

Dr. Death sounds like a horror story title. In the case of Christopher Daniel Duntsch, it’s a true horror story. Christopher Duntsch was an American doctor and specialized as a spinal surgeon—a deadly spinal surgeon—who killed three of his patients and maimed 31 others during a two-year span. Today, Duntsch is serving a life imprisonment term in a Texas prison, and he’s now the subject of an NBC Peacock netstreaming series featuring some big-name, A-List actors like Alex Baldwin, Christian Slater, and Kelsey Grammer. The series is rightly titled “Dr. Death.”

The story of this psychopath with a scalpel is shocking. But what’s equally shocking is how the “medical system” allowed this monstrous medical menace to operate on completely innocent and critically ill people. It was no secret in medical circles that Duntsch was a clear and present danger to patients. In fact, it was peers within the system who nicknamed him Dr. Death, but few did anything about it.

The Dr. Death tragic story is that of major systemic failure. It’s a common theme in true crime stories, and there’s nothing truer than the tragic damage done by Christopher Duntsch to unwitting patients. It’s a story of incompetence. It’s a story of cover-ups. And it’s a story of corporate greed within the medical business community.

To understand how Christopher Duntsch turned into Dr. Death, it’s necessary to know his background. Let’s first look at Duntsch’s upbringing and his training before examining the carnage created by turning Dr. Death—The Killer Surgeon—loose in the hospital O.R.

Christopher Duntsch was born in 1971 in Montana. He was raised in Memphis, Tennessee in a stable, middle-class, evangelical Christian home. Duntsch was an average student and sports player. However, Duntsch was driven in his football interest and, despite his lack of natural ability, he trained far harder than other players and made the college team when he enrolled at Colorado State University. One of his teammates later said, “Chris lacked talent but he worked harder than the rest of us.”

Duntsch carried this drive back to Memphis when he was accepted into medical school at Memphis State University. He completed the ambitious MD-PhD program then entered the neurosurgery residency program at the University of Tennessee. Following graduation as a doctor at U of T, Duntsch completed a spine fellowship at the Semmes-Murphy clinic in Memphis.

A later investigation determined Duntsch only juniored in around 100 minimal-invasive surgeries when the typical neurosurgeon completes 1,000 during their residency and before they’re considered competent to lead a surgery. Cracks were obvious during Duntsch’s training time which was plagued with drug use and a suspension period served in a rehab facility. One colleague later testified that Duntsch regularly used LSD and cocaine at night and then go to work performing spinal operations in the morning.

During his university years, Christopher Duntsch married Wendy Renee Young with whom he had two children. Duntsch also racked up a half-million in debt and a drug dependency. Then he formulated a fraudulent curriculum vitae. In a 12-page, single-spaced document, Christopher Duntsch looked eminently qualified as a neurosurgeon. One, of many, false claims was  stating he’d graduated magna cum laude from a prestigious doctorate in microbiology.

One of the reasons Duntsch focused on neurosurgery was its lucrative salary of approximately $600,000 per year. It’s also why so many medical facilities conveniently overlooked his background checks—neurosurgery was their most lucrative (ie profitable) division. Neurosurgeons were in short supply and corporate greed ultimately trumped patient safety while Christopher Duntsch preyed on poor people propped up by pools of money. A later investigation determined the average cost of a US spinal surgery exceeded $75,000 with much of that being profit for the hospital.

Duntsch’s first solo surgical employment was at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Plano, Texas. This was in 2011. He was under the watchful eye of a very experienced neurosurgeon, Dr. Randall Kirby, who was immediately suspicious of Duntsch’s surgical ability despite Duntsch’s boasting and alleged credentials. Dr. Kirby later testified that, “Dr. Duntsch had no business in the operating room, and he could not wield a scalpel.”

After five majorly botched operations, the hospital allowed Duntsch to resign rather than be fired. The later investigation learned the Baylor hospital administration feared Duntsch would win a wrongful dismissal lawsuit if forcibly dismissed that could cost the institution millions of dollars. This deal was devastating to future Duntsch patients at other facilities because the hospital could not report Dr. Duntsch to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) which kept easy-access records of flagged problematic physicians.

Christopher Duntsch escaped what should have been mandatory NPDB registry for malpractice situations like:

  • Operating on the wrong part of the back leaving Kenneth Fennell in permanent chronic pain with debilitated mobility.
  • Cutting an unnecessary ligament in Lee Passmore as well as leaving stainless screws in incorrect positions and stripping the threads so they could not be removed.
  • Leaving bone fragments in Barry Morguloff that worked their way into his spinal cord leaving him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.
  • Causing Jerry Summers to suffer so much blood loss that he died from an infection from excessive transfusions.
  • Severing a major artery in Kelli Martin and causing her to bleed to death without adding blood during her surgery.

It was no secret at Baylor that Christopher Duntsch was dangerous. Many even wondered about his sanity. But that didn’t stop his medical career.

Dallas Medical Center hired Dr. Dirtsch as a temporary neurosurgeon in 2012. Almost immediately, hospital staff questioned Duntsch’s qualifications and suspected him of being under drug influence while operating. Some of Duntsch’s catastrophes in Dallas were:

  • Severing Floella Brown’s vertebral artery and allowing her to bleed to death without medical intervention.
  • Maiming a senior, Mary Efurd, and causing her excruciating pain—rated as ten-plus on a 1-10 scale.

Longtime neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Henderson, performed a salvage surgery on Mary Efurd. Henderson realized what an awful job Duntsch did, and he began investigating Duntsch’s history which was now following him around. Dr. Henderson contacted Dr. Kirby of Plano. The two pacted to do their own investigation and put a stop to Dr. Death.

Because Duntsch was a temporary employee, he was immediately dismissed after these two incidents. And because Duntsch was a temporary employee, Dallas Medical Center was not required to report Dr. Duntsch to the NPDB. They didn’t, and Duntsch moved on to two more Texas medical facilities, the South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas and the Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco.

By 2013, Christopher Duntsch’s behavior was getting bizarre. He caused a string of devastating surgeries and, thankfully, no one else died. However, many folks suffered significant and long-lasting trauma. University General Hospital in Dallas was Duntsch’s last operation. Here, he severed Jeff Glidewell’s esophagus and the neighboring artery. To stop the bleeding, Duntsch stuffed a surgical sponge down Glidewell’s throat and sewed him up with the sponge still inside. The poor man nearly choked before others intervened and removed it.

On June 26, 2013, the Texas Medical Board suspended Christopher Duntsch’s practitioner license. This was after appeals by Dr. Kirby and Dr. Henderson who told the board Duntsch was a sociopath and a clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas. The board slowly investigated with most of its members not believing that any medical doctor could be this bad and incompetent. They found out otherwise and revoked Duntsch’s license on December 6, 2013.

Meanwhile, Kirby and Henderson lobbied the Dallas DA to file charges against Duntsch. This investigation lumbered along at a tree’s pace. Duntsch then left town. He moved to Denver, declared bankruptcy for over $1 million in debt, got arrested for DUI and shoplifting, and was hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation.

Private lawsuits began against some of the medical facilities that allowed Duntsch to operate. Finally, in July 2015, the DA filed six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, five counts of aggravated assault causing bodily harm, and one count of injuring an elderly person—Mary Efurd. Murder charges weren’t laid as the DA felt the state couldn’t prove Duntch’s clear intent to kill anyone. This was despite a piece of evidence turned over by Duntsch’s now ex-wife—an email to her from him stating, “I am ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold-blooded killer.”

After a 15-day trial, a Texas jury found Christopher Duntsch guilty on all counts. The Appeals Court upheld Duntsch’s sentence of life imprisonment. Currently, he’s held in Huntsville and won’t be eligible to apply for parole until 2045 when he’ll be 74 years old.

Duntsch’s conviction was precedent-setting. It was the first time in United States history that a medical practitioner was convicted of criminally harming their patients. In Duntsch’s defense, his lawyer told the jury, “The only way this happens is that the entire system failed the patients.”

Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means “First, do no harm”. This is med-school 101 along with taking the Hippocratic Oath. The oath is as old as the ancient Greeks and the modern version goes:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

  • I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
  • I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
  • I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
  • I will not be ashamed to say “I know not”, nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
  • I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
  • I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
  • I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
  • I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
  • If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

Christopher Duntsch—Dr. Death, The Killer Surgeon—had blatant disdain for primum non nocere. He took a scalpel to his Hippocratic Oath.

NEW CRIME BOOK – *AT THE CABIN* by GARRY RODGERS

Crime pays. That’s what I’ve learned as I publish Book 8 in my based-on-true-crime series — At The Cabin. This follows In The Attic (which was #1 on Amazon’s Crime Thriller Bestselling list), Under The Ground, From The Shadows, Beside The Road, On The Floor, Between The Bikers, and Beyond The Limits. 4 more are planned in this series, but they’ve suddenly braked while I explore an intriguing opportunity with the film industry — a net-streaming project titled City Of Danger. In the mean time, here’s the product description / blurb / jacket copy for At The Cabin.

——

What monstrous savage viciously attacked Bea Bonnell—inflicting fractures, burns, and excruciating torture on her? And why did he do it? Bea was seventy-four years old, for God’s sake, when this true crime story occurred.

Beatrice Bonnell and her husband, Stan Bonnell, spend their winters at the cabin they own on De Courcy Island in the mild southwest coast of British Columbia. Their De Courcy cabin is far south of their second home near Atlin, an equally small place in the cold goldfields of northern Canada’s Yukon Territory. And it’s always safe and secure at the De Courcy cabin—until a masked and armed stranger arrives with a depraved demand and the brutal intent of getting back something extremely valuable. Bea resists, and the barbaric beast works Bea over—breaking her fingers and ribs, repeatedly singeing her side with a red-hot knife, then setting the cabin on fire with Bea blindfolded and hogtied inside.

Is there a link between the two cabins—Atlin and De Courcy—bringing on this atrocious assault and putting Bea Bonnell into a life-threatening state where she’ll succumb to horrific wounds? That’s the complex case facing the Serious Crimes Section. Their intricate investigation takes detectives from the wintery waters of the Pacific Northwest to the snow-packed roads of the Klondike where they prove two fundamentals found in solving all crimes. One: Occam’s razor—when faced with two hypotheses, the simpler one is always correct. Two: The stranger the circumstances, the closer the answer is to home.

At The Cabin is Book 8 in the Based-On-True-Crime Series by Garry Rodgers, a retired homicide detective with a second career as a coroner—now reincarnated into an international bestselling crime writer. Get At The Cabin in eBook format at Amazon, Kobo, and Nook.

Here are the First Two Chapters of At The Cabin

WARNING!

At The Cabin is based on a true crime story. Explicit descriptions of the crime scenes, factual dialogue, real forensic procedures, and actual police investigation, interview and interrogation techniques are portrayed. Some names, times, and locations have been changed for privacy concerns and commercial purposes.

Chapter One — Thursday, March 11th – 8:35 a.m.

“She’s lucky she’s still alive.” The detective from our Green Timbers Serious Crimes Section stopped. She swallowed. She was on the other end of my phone, calling from the Burn Unit at Vancouver General Hospital. “I’ve never seen such injuries… deliberate injuries. The viciousness of this attack is fu… appalling! Sheer cruelty and excruciating torture.”

“What’s the lady’s name again?” I had my notebook open, pen in hand, and a dark roast on my workstation desk.

“Beatrice Bonnell. She goes by Bea.” The Vancouver detective paused. She swallowed again. “Bea’s seventy-four years old, for God’s sake. This assault is just… excuse the language… fucking abhorrent!”

“Where did you say this happened?” I heard her say the place when she called to report one of the most despicable and savage offenses I’d ever investigate.

“At the cabin they own. It’s on De Courcy Island. Our map indicates it’s in your territory. Nanaimo Regional District.”

——

De Courcy Island was in my policing area. De Courcy was one of many chunks of rocky land jutting from the Pacific Ocean off the southeast side of Vancouver Island in British Columbia at Canada’s west coast. Officially, this water-bound and tree-filled region was known as the Southern Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. Unofficially, the area was the “Big Island” and a bunch of little ones—over a hundred of them, depending on how you classified islands.

I was at my desk at the Nanaimo Serious Crimes Section when my colleague from Vancouver phoned. She’d been notified by hospital authorities when Bea Bonnell arrived by Helijet ambulance the previous evening. Because Bea’s attacked occurred outside the City of Vancouver, investigation responsibility fell to the local area holding jurisdiction for the spot.

That spot, on De Courcy, was just south of Nanaimo, which is a small city of 100,000 on the Big Island. Nanaimo was a hub of activity being straight across from Vancouver proper which was one of the most exotic, erotic, and expensive paces on the planet. Nanaimo also had an active crime rate exceeding Vancouver’s when measured on a per capita base. And the crime against Bea Bonnell rated at the top of atrocities one human being can inflict upon another.

——

“Give me what you got so far.” I was ready to write more besides Bea Bonnell and At The Cabin.

“I don’t know much, to be honest.” The detective’s voice was overtight, like a wound watch spring read to snap. “She was admitted here at eight-forty p.m. last night. Airlifted from Nanaimo to VGH, and they put her directly in the burn unit. It’s questionable if she’ll make it. She’s in critical condition suffering not only from multiple third-degree burns but also from fractured ribs and broken fingers. Whoever did this really worked her over.”

“Any suspects or motive?”

“No suspects by name. Just a lone male. Unknown male. Masked male armed with a handgun. Robbery on the surface, but I think there’s more going on here that’s not being told.”

“Like what?”

“It’s just the vibe I’m getting. What I’m told, and this is third-hand, is that the victim was alone at the cabin she and her husband Stanley Bonnell have on De Courcy Island. He goes by Stan. Stan Bonnell. Little older than her. Seventy-six.”

“Stan and Bea Bonnell? Seventy-four and seventy-six? When did the attack happen?”

“Yesterday afternoon. The best I can get is that it was after one p.m. when Stan left Bea alone at the cabin while he went to town. Nanaimo. They live at an isolated spot on De Courcy and have to take a boat off and on. Do you know the place? De Courcy, I mean. Not necessarily the cabin itself.”

“Yup. I’ve been in Nanaimo over thirty years, and I’m a boater. I’m familiar with De Courcy’s location and coastline but not the island by land. It’s like a lot of these small Gulf Islands. Sparsely populated and private.”

“Right. I Googled it. I also have GPS coordinates for the cabin location.”

“What else do you have?” I asked this as I wrote the GPS numbers in my book. “What was this guy after?”

“Well, this is where I’m having trouble. Bea is sedated so she can’t talk. The only one she’s told is Stan and he’s… I don’t know how to put it… vague. Not… I can’t say evasive. Maybe a touch of dementia, or maybe just the stress of this whole thing.”

“I can understand the stress. What’s the extent of Bea’s injuries?”

“Most of her fingers and some of her ribs are broken. Then she has a series of thirteen individual burns along her left side. Directly on her skin from her hip up to her mid-chest area. They look like what she says happened. First, he tied her hands behind her back. Then he broke or dislocated her thumbs and fingers and he threw her on the floor and began kicking her in the ribs. Then it got worse. He heated up a knife on the stove and began burning her again and again along the side until he got frustrated and left but not before setting the cabin on fire with her hog-tied with a pillowcase over her head.”

“Hog-tied? Pillowcase? Set the cabin on fire with her in it?” I’d never heard anything like it. “How the fuck did she survive?”

“She must be one tough old bird.” The detective was tenser now than when she’d started talking. “This is what I got from Stan and the medical staff he talked to. Stan left Bea alone at the cabin while he took his boat and left De Courcy to get something. He was gone four hours and got back just before dark. He found Bea lying on the ground outside the cabin door. She was still bound and hooded. She was in terrible pain and nearly delirious as well as hypothermic.

“I can’t imagine. It was so cold and wet here yesterday.”

“The best I know of what Bea told Stan, and this is hearsay, is that after Stan left, this masked man showed up at the cabin holding a handgun and threatened to kill her, Bea, if she didn’t give him what he wanted. Bea refused, so the guy wrapped her hands behind her back and took a pillowcase, I don’t know, from the bed maybe, and pulled it over her head. He told her he was going to work her over till she gave in. She told him she didn’t have anything to give him. Then he started bending and snapping her fingers, put the boots to her ribs, and then went into the burning.”

“This is just fuckin’ sick.”

“No better word to describe it.” The detective’s voice was like someone had turned her volume down.

“Then he set the cabin on fire? How’d she get out of being hooded and hog-tied?”

“I’m not that clear about this. The cabin didn’t burn down. He, the bad guy, told her since she didn’t give up what he wanted, she could die in there. So he took a bunch of papers and placed them around the stove. They caught fire and he left, closing the door behind him. Bea could see flames through the pillowcase, so she wiggled her way to the stove and managed to knock a pot of water off the top and that drenched the papers.”

“Wow!”

“Then she wormed her way to the door, forced it open, and rolled outside. Bea lay there on the wet and cold ground until Stan got back. Oh! And her feet, ankles, were tied too.”

“Just wow!”

“Like I first said, she’s fucking lucky to still be alive.”

“What’s her medical prognosis?”

“Not good. She’s in critical condition. They’re afraid she’s going to develop complications and pass away. The severity of her injuries and her age are so stacked against her.”

“What was this guy after? Like, to go to this extent, there must be something extremely valuable he wanted.”

“This is where I’m having a hard time.” The detective took a long pause. She quietly said, “I don’t think Stan is being truthful with me.”

Chapter Two — Thursday, March 11th – 9:40 a.m.

I sat in Leaky Lewis’s office. Harry was with me. We talked about the report I’d received on Bea and Stan Bonnell from the Green Timbers detective.

Leaky was in charge of support services in our police department. His real name was Jim Lewis, and he got the nickname because of a chronic condition. Leaky suffered from urinary incontinence which made him well suited to occupy the corner office equipped with a private washroom.

Our Nanaimo force had a complement of around 140 regular police officers with an additional sixty civilians working in various roles. The backbone of any police force is the uniform or patrol officers who handle front-line complaints and emergencies. I spent very little time in uniform as I quickly realized where the backbone ends up so I made a play for criminal investigations. Now, I had well over thirty years of detective experience and was a leading candidate to be put out to pasture—cop-speak for retirement.

The support services Leaky commanded included our Serious Crimes Section. We had three teams of two detectives, each of whom were mandated to solve violent offenses against people. Mostly, we did murder cases but serious assaults like the one on Bea Bonnell fell into our hands, especially since Bea’s prognosis wasn’t good. This had every shadow of a murder file developing as the time passed and clues came to light.

Besides our overworked Serious Crime Section, Leaky looked after our Forensic Identification Section, which was the CSI department, Drug Squad, Criminal Intelligence, Commercial Crime, Street Crew, Property Crimes, and one poor prick plagued with frauds and bad plastic.

Harry was my detective partner. Her real name was Sheryl Henderson. Sheryl was a large lady with large hair and an even larger personality. She got the name Harry after the Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the movie Harry and the Hendersons.

——

“I think Stan’s hiding something.” Harry was the first to speak. She’d listened in to the phone call with the Vancouver detective. “I don’t buy Stan’s statement. Like, some armed and masked stranger shows up while he’s away and does this to his wife and Stan doesn’t know what the guy was after? Give me a fucking break.”

Harry was never one to suppress her opinion. She was usually right, but tact and diplomacy weren’t strong character traits with Harry. Still, I loved her as my partner of three years, and I knew the number one strength holding Harry together—her loyalty.

We played the audio-recorded statement the detective took from Stan Bonnell and shipped to us as an email attachment.

——

“Please state your full name and address, Mister Bonnell.”

“Right. I’m Stanley Edgar Bonnell. That’s Bonnell with two n’s and two l’s. I go by Stan. Stan Bonnell. We have two places. That’s me ’n Bea, my wife. Beatrice June Bonnell. The winter we spend down at the cabin on De Courcy Island. Summers, me ’n Bea are up at the cabin at Surprise Lake ’bout twenty miles due east of Atlin. Atlin, if you know where it is, is in the northwest corner of British Columbia. Closest big town or trading center up there is Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. We come down to De Courcy in November when things start to freeze up in the north, and we head back up in late April when things start to thaw out again and the frost is gone enough so we can work the ground.”

“Very well. Please tell me what happened at the cabin on De Courcy Island that led to you and your wife Bea to be here at Vancouver General Hospital where we’re recording your statement today.”

“Right. So I don’t know exactly what happened at the cabin ’cause I wasn’t there when it happened. I can only go by what Bea managed to tell me, and what I saw musta gone on. I was away in town. At Nanaimo. I left just after noon to conduct business and get supplies and I took the boat we moor at De Courcy at Gunderson’s dock. Bea was fine and everything was good when I left. However, when I come back approaching dark, I arrived to find a hell of a mess. Here was poor Bea all wrapped up on the ground outside the door and she was terrified and in terrible pain from her injuries. I pulls up in the truck. We got an old truck we use to get around on the island as the cabin is not down by the dock. It’s a bit inland. Anyway, I sees Bea on the ground with her hands tied behind her and her feet cinched at the ankles and this soaking wet cloth hood over her head and I says, ‘Land’s sakes woman. What have you gone and done to yourself?’ And she says the best she can ’cause she’s now terribly cold and shaking and really in pain, ‘He tried to rob me and he smashed-up my hands and my ribs and burnt me all over with a hot knife.’ And I says, ‘Who? Who done this?’ I untied her. Actually, I cut the rope off her hands and feet, ankles, and I yanked the hood off and I got her up and into the truck where what we got left of a heater was on. Bea says, ‘I don’t know who done this. I got no idea at all. You got to get me to the hospital.’ She was in bad shape. Real bad shape and the medical folks here don’t know if she’s gonna make it. Gonna pull through.”

“Did she describe her attacker?”

“Masked man with a gun. Handgun. That’s all she said. She got no idea who done this.”

“Did your wife say what he wanted? What he was after that made him do this?”

“She didn’t get into that much detail. She also told me he tried to set fire to the cabin with her in there. I looked and I saw where the papers on the floor were burnt and where she kicked the hot water pot over to douse them out.”

‘She was able to give you this detail, but not the reason the masked man with the gun came to your cabin and did these horrific acts to her?”

“Nope. I mean yes. Yes, Bea said what happened. As in who it was and what he did to her. She didn’t exactly go into all what was said. Like I said, Bea was in awful pain and terribly cold. All she wanted, and all I could think of, was getting her warmed up and to a place where her injuries could be treated. I took her by boat to Nanaimo where an ambulance met us at the dock. Seeing how bad she was, they flew her straight over here to the burn ward.”

“Excuse me for a sec. You said Bea knew who it was. She knew who it was that attacked her?”

“No. No. She knew it was a masked man with a gun who done this. A loner. She didn’t know who the guy was as in his identity. I got no clue who done this.”

“Do you know why he attacked Bea? What exactly he was after?”

“He might have been after something. Something real valuable enough to go to this stretch.”

“Stan, this is an extremely vicious attack. Whoever is behind this must have been desperate for something. What’s your suspicion?”

“I can’t really say.”

Chapter Three — Thursday, March 11th – 9:55 a.m.

“He can’t really say.” Harry scoffed. She clicked her pen. “Bullshit.”

——

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