Major Schaeffer, referring to his notebook, recited the inventory of what was found-key chain, wallet, Glock, credentials, and so forth, and where it was found on the body.
As Schaeffer spoke, I tried to reconstruct how Madox had done this, and I concluded that he’d needed at least one accomplice-probably Carl and maybe someone else, though I doubted that Madox wanted two witnesses to this.
Harry had been drugged, and his ankles had been shackled. They’d put him in the sleeping compartment of the camper and driven him out here. There could have been a second vehicle for a getaway.
Assuming, then, that Madox did not want more than one accomplice, and assuming that Harry was drugged and nearly comatose, Madox was then presented with the problem of how to stand Harry upright so he could be shot in the back as though he’d been walking.
One man could not hold a drugged man upright while the other fired, so the solution was to put Harry on his knees, while Carl-or Madox-held the binoculars and strap tightly around Harry’s neck to keep him in the kneeling position. Then, the shooter knelt and put a bullet through Harry’s spine and heart.
The accomplice let go of the binoculars as Harry was falling forward, and the binoculars ended up where I saw them in the photo. Then, one or both men unshackled Harry’s ankles and moved his arms and legs to simulate the position of a body being hit by a high-velocity bullet and falling forward from a standing position. Then, probably, they’d brushed the trail with pine boughs. The only thing they’d forgotten was that the binoculars would most probably have ended up under the body, and may also have been damaged by the round passing through the body and out the chest.
Otherwise, they did a good job, if I could use that word for a cold-blooded murder.
Schaeffer asked us, “Do you want to see the camper?”
I nodded and handed the photos back to him.
He led us around the yellow tape and through the woods.
We came out on the trail again near the SUV, where the police had also widened the trail for a turnaround. Schaeffer got one of his troopers to drive us the three miles up the trail to where the camper sat parked in a small clearing.
We got out, and I looked at Harry’s camper, which I’d never seen before. It was an old Chevy pickup, fitted with a sleeper on the truck bed. Old as it was, it seemed as if it had been kept meticulously clean and in good repair.
Schaeffer said, “We dusted it for prints, did some vacuuming, and got some dirt samples out of the tire treads. This afternoon, we’ll tow it out of here to the highway, put it on a flatbed, and send it to the forensic garage in Albany for a thorough going-over. Obviously, we’re looking for evidence of other people being in the vehicle.”
I said to him, “Sounds like you think it was premeditated murder.”
“Let’s assume it was.”
I pictured Harry drugged and bound in the rear sleeping compartment, and someone, maybe Carl, at the wheel. Driving in front of the camper was Madox in one of his vehicles: a Jeep, a van, or an all-terrain vehicle.
I asked Schaeffer about tire marks on the trail, and he replied, “As you can see, this is hard-packed earth, plus it hasn’t rained in two weeks, and then you have all these leaves and pine boughs on the trail. So, no, we didn’t get any good tire marks.”
Kate asked, “Did the dusting indicate that any surfaces had been wiped clean?”
“No. When you have premeditation, you have gloves. We might get some interesting clothing fibers, but again, with premeditation and smarts, the perpetrators would burn whatever they wore.” He added, “There’s an open Coke can in the beverage holder, and we’ll do a DNA on that, but I don’t think our perps were drinking Coke. If we recover DNA, it will probably be Harry’s.”
Schaeffer looked around at the clearing, then down the trail, and said, “Okay, so here’s the camper. What I’m thinking is that there were at least two perpetrators, and two vehicles-the camper and the getaway vehicle-though, as I said, there were no distinct tire marks. They stopped back there, shot the victim, then got back in the vehicles and continued on, putting some distance between themselves and the scene of the crime.”
Kate and I nodded, and Schaeffer continued, “If they were locals, they knew about this clearing where a lot of campers and hikers pull off. Then, if you go another mile up this trail, you reach a paved road. So, one guy parked the camper here where you see it, then got into the getaway vehicle, and within a few minutes, they were making their getaway on the paved road up ahead.”
Major Schaeffer had done a credible job of reconstructing the crime, partly because he’d already had some time on the scene with CSI people putting their heads together, and partly because he had knowledge of the area.
I said to Major Schaeffer, “I assume you have the key to this camper, which was missing from Harry’s key chain in the morgue.”
“I do.” He reminded me, “You said you didn’t handle the evidence in the morgue.”
“Did I say that?” I continued, “I also assume you confirmed that the Chevy truck key you found on the chain was for this camper.”
He looked at me. “We’re not as smart as you city guys, Detective, but we’re not stupid.”
Based on my previous experiences with rural and suburban cops, I realized that statement was long overdue. I said, “Just checking,” then asked, “How do you think the perpetrators moved this camper three miles from where the body and the ignition key were found?”
“They could have hot-wired the camper, towed it with their other vehicle, or even had a duplicate key made before the crime. But the most likely answer is that the victim had a spare key on his person, or in the vehicle.”
“Right.” I told him about the apparently missing spare Chevy key in Harry’s wallet, and asked him, “Did you notice that?”
He didn’t reply directly but informed me, “The absence of a key among other keys is not proof that there was a key.”
“Right… I’m just speculating.”
Actually, this was a detective’s pissing match, which we all do to keep everyone on their toes, which is good for the investigation, not to mention the detectives’ egos.
Kate seemed to sense this and said, “In any case, this was made to appear that Harry left the camper here, and began walking north, toward the Custer Hill Club, and met with an accident three miles from his camper, and about three more miles from the Custer Hill property.” She concluded, “Bottom line, he would not have parked six miles from the surveillance property. Plus, the phone call to his girlfriend at seven forty-eight A.M. indicated he was near the subject property, but that’s not where he was found. Therefore, we have problems with time, distance, logic, and plausibility, which leads us to conclude that what we see here is not what Harry actually did on Saturday morning, but what someone did to him about a day later.”
That pretty much summed it up, and neither Major Schaeffer nor I had anything to add.
So we’d done all we could here, which wasn’t much, but you had to begin at the scene of the crime, then work backward and forward from there.
The trick was not to become process oriented but to remember the goal, which was to find the killer. The good news was that I had a suspect. Bain Madox. And I had a possible accomplice. Carl. But neither of those names was going to appear on the New York state police homicide report.
I asked Schaeffer, “Are the FBI agents in your office coming out here?”
“I asked them, and they said another team would do that-an Evidence Recovery Team. These guys in my office don’t seem particularly interested in the crime scene.”
No, I thought, they were more interested in Bain Madox than Harry Muller. And Liam Griffith was only interested in John Corey and Kate Mayfield.