“Bundy,” said the same man.
The resemblance was undeniable. Dark hair. Handsome features. Eyes steely and calm. Smile almost apologetic, as if he was sorry the crowd had to put up with all the lies spoken about him.
Still, the bandage on his right hand told that one of the spectacular stories was true.
The accused moved toward the defense table, where Counselor Barnett and Detective Donna Leland pulled out a chair for him.
“Thank you, Donna,” said the man.
“You’re welcome, William.”
He sat with a lean, contrite motion: his hands swung down into his lap, and his close-cropped head bowed in a combination of respect and guilt. The camera lenses still scissored open and shut behind him. The air fairly hummed. Eyes were wide and unblinking. Tongues shied back from teeth. The room was filled with a communal and galvanic dread, the sort reserved for celebrities, messiahs, and demons. He was all of them. No longer would the name John Doe mean anonymity. Now it would mean depravity. The insistent clamor of gavel raps cut through the buzz of glaring eyes and grinding teeth.
“Enough,” the judge said quietly. “If every movement of the accused is going to make a sensation, I’ll clear the court.” She peered around the room, eyes focusing just above the half-glasses she wore for reading. She had the stern air of a schoolmarm. “Better.”
Without abandoning the papers beneath her fingers, she said, “John Doe, you are charged with four murders in the county of Racine, a fifth in Walworth County, and a sixth in Kenosha County. Once this trial is concluded, you will be extradited for trial in the state of Illinois, and after that, the state of Indiana. Is this understood?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he replied. Though quiet, his voice carried through the room.
“All right, then,” Judge Devlin said, “let’s get to it. Opening arguments. Counselor Franklin, are you prepared?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said, standing. Jim Franklin was tall, strong, and handsome. His gray-blue suit made him seem a man of stainless steel. The gray-blue shadow of a latent beard extended the sheen of the suit up across his Adam’s apple and to his cheekbones. With a theatrical flair, he gazed down at the tabletop, where his hands patiently sifted through the folios spilled from his attache.
Counselor Barnett watched her colleague, her adversary. The look of attention on her face deepened to annoyance.
Franklin glanced at her, then up at the bench, and last at the jury. “Your Honor, people of Wisconsin, what we begin today is a most difficult trial.
“That man there, known in the records as John Doe, stands accused in this state of six brutal murders. These were monstrous crimes, involving amputations and gallons of blood. He has supplied various confessions of his guilt, saying he killed his cell mate Derek Billings by strangling the man with a penny and his own thumb; saying he orchestrated the five other murders – what we call ‘murder by proxy.’ Still, he pleads not guilty. He has passed a competency hearing and remains in command of his own defense – but still he plans to tell you he is insane. He wants it both ways. He is sane and guilty when it benefits him, and insane and not guilty when that works better.
“Insane? Not guilty? I don’t think so. I don’t think even this man thinks so. Just two weeks ago, the defense got nervous and began pushing for a plea-bargain verdict of guilty in exchange for a declaration of insanity, letting John Doe live out his days in a comfortable mental institution rather than a maximum security penitentiary. I would not allow that. This man is not insane. Murderous, yes. Cunning, ruthless, manipulative, charismatic, yes. But insane? No.
“You wonder: How can a man who enjoyed decapitating perfect strangers not be insane? Well, first you must understand what is meant by insanity. It is a legal term, not a psychiatric one. By law, a person is insane if he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.
“An insane person, thus, does nothing to hide his crimes: he does not perceive of them as criminal. This man hid his crimes. He found a violent paranoid schizophrenic in a poorly run group home and used him to fulfill his murderous fantasies. John Doe is not insane. If he were, why would he choose a patsy to commit his crimes? Why would he carefully avoid leaving his own fingerprints anywhere? Because he knew what he was doing was wrong.
“John Doe is not psychotic – unable to understand and cope with the world in which he lives. He is sociopathic. He knows exactly what he is doing in this world. He understands right and wrong but chooses wrong. He pretends to be mentally ill so that he can kill with impunity. Here is a man who admits to two gruesome murders and is suspected of many more, in three separate states!
“Through expert testimony from psychiatrists, police officers, medical examiners, and FBI profilers, the prosecution will show you the man behind this smug mask. You will see that John Doe is more cunning than Ted Bundy, who some say slew more than fifty women from coast to coast before he was stopped. You will see that John Doe is more duplicitous than John Wayne Gacy, the upstanding building contractor and birthday party clown who buried more than thirty young men and boys in his own home. You will see that John Doe is more sexually sadistic than Jeffrey Dahmer, who drugged and raped his victims, killed them, had sex with their dead bodies, dissected them, and ate the pieces.
“These four killers are the same – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – people who, on the surface, seem incapable of the atrocities they easily, constantly, and secretly committed. All four – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – invented elaborate lies to cover their actions. Doe’s lies sound like those of David Berkowitz – the Son of Sam, who said his dog was an ancient Babylonian devil, telling him to kill.
“I need not refer to the tabloids. Doe, in his own confessions, provides the best and most damning copy. He has an elaborate cover story. He says he killed all these people – and many more – because he is a fallen angel.
“Don’t laugh. That is the man’s defense. He wants you to think he is not just crazy, but legally insane. His lawyer has an even more unbelievable lie, that he is a shell-shocked Gulf War hero. He is no hero, folks. He is no angel, but a cold-blooded killer.
“If Wisconsin had a death penalty, I would plead for it in this case. Because we do not, I hope for back-to-back life sentences for every victim to be served and without the possibility of parole. He’s fooled too many people for too long. Don’t become the next victims of this charismatic sociopath. Thank you.”
District Attorney Franklin gazed one last level time at the jury and then again at the judge, his eyes keen and honest. He sat, his stainless steel suit silently reshaping around him.
“A statement from the defense?” prompted Judge Devlin.
Lynda Barnett rose. After the slick coldness of Franklin’s delivery, the woman in the bright skirt-suit seemed a tribal wise woman, a storyteller. Her flesh was the color of good, rich earth. Honest. Direct. There was no shuffling of papers on the table, no leaning intensity. There was only the calm, quiet sound of soft-soled shoes on the cold marble floor.
She turned toward the jury. “It would be so easy if what Mr Franklin said were true. But truth isn’t a melodrama. We do not live our lives among heroes and monsters. We live among people. That’s what we are, people.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet a very troubled person, Mr William B. Dance,” she gestured to the prisoner. “Mr Franklin would not call him a person. Not even a mentally ill person. He calls him a monster – a hobgoblin, a bogeyman, the creature in the closet.
“It’s not that Mr Franklin really believes in such things, but he thinks the rest of us do, or at least he thinks he can scare us into believing in them. He offers folk tales. I offer facts. I want a fair trial; he wants a lynch mob.