James Ellroy
Silent Terror
TO
DUANE TUCKER
FROM THE BIG APPLE TATTLER. SEPTEMBER 13, 1983:
At 3:00 A.M. this morning, the sleepy town of New Rochelle was the sight of life-and-death drama as federal agents and local police zeroed in on a tidy little boardinghouse on the edge of the downtown area.
Inside, in a tidy little third-floor room, slept Martin Michael Plunkett, age 35, the suspected sex slayer of two sets of Westchester County lovebirds — Madeleine Behrens, 23, and her boyfriend Richard Liggett, 24, and Dominic De Nunzio, 18, and his fiancée Rosemary Cafferty, 17. Dubbed the “Sexecutioner” by local authorities, Plunkett is suspected of several other similarly brutal killings — murders that span the entire United States and go back a decade.
But the tall, intense-looking killer wasn’t in a killing mood when G-men, led by F.B.I. Serial Killer Task Force agent Thomas Dusenberry evacuated the boardinghouse and gave him a bull-horn ultimatum: “We have you surrounded, Plunkett! Surrender, or we’ll come in and get you!”
The 800 block of South Lockwood was deathly still in the bullhorn’s echo, then the “Sexecutioner’s” voice rang out: “I’m unarmed. I want to talk to the head man before you take me in.”
Amidst stunned protests from both the New Rochelle SWAT Team and his fellow F.B.I. men, Inspector Dusenberry walked into the killer’s room; then, five minutes later, led Plunkett out, handcuffed. When asked what transpired during those five minutes, Dusenberry said, “The man and I talked. He wanted to make sure that when he confessed, his statement would be printed verbatim. He was quite clear about that. It seemed very important to him.”
FROM THE “LEGAL PRECEDENTS” SECTION OF THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY, MAY 10, 1984:
Both legal scholars and forensic psychologists continue to take a keen interest in the case of Martin Michael Plunkett, convicted in February on four counts of First Degree Murder in Westchester County, New York.
Sentenced to four consecutive life sentences and currently held in protective custody at Sing Sing Prison, Plunkett, 36, offered no defense at his trial. Acting as his own attorney, he submitted a notarized written statement to the judge and, before a packed courtroom, repeated that statement verbatim:
“On September 9, 1983, I murdered Madeleine Behrens and Richard Liggett. The Knife I used to kill them is wrapped in a plastic bag and buried near the southwest corner of the lake in Huguenot Park, near the corner of North Avenue and Eastchester Road in New Rochelle, New York. On September 10, 1983, I murdered Dominic De Nunzio and Rosemary Cafferty. The saw I used to dismember them is wrapped in a plastic bag and buried at the base of a sycamore tree immediately in front of the public library in Bronxville, New York. This is my first, final and only statement regarding the crimes for which I stand accused, and for any others I may be suspected as having perpetrated.”
Investigators found the murder weapons Plunkett described, with his fingerprints on them. Forensic technicians ran batteries of tests, and said that the knife’s cutting edge matched perfectly to “SS” carvings on the legs of the four victims. Plunkett, who had maintained complete silence since his September 13 arrest, was convicted on the basis of the physical evidence and his statement.
That silence has created a furor among law-enforcement officials who are convinced that Plunkett’s number of victims may run as high as fifty. Thomas Dusenberry, the F.B.I. agent who headed the investigation that led to Plunkett’s arrest, said, “Based on psychological workups on the Behrens/Liggett and De Nunzio/Cafferty killings and on unsolved murders and disappearances that correspond in time sequence to our knowledge of Martin Plunkett’s movements, I suspect him of at least thirty additional murders and non-sequitur disappearances. A confession, voluntary or drug-induced, would save law-enforcement agencies untold investigatory hours — many of the cases we ‘make’ Plunkett for are still open.”
But Plunkett, whose school records indicate genius-level intelligence, will not even speak, much less confess, and, legally, he cannot be coerced into doing so. Thus, two disparate sources are petitioning New York State prison officials in an effort to gain access to his criminal memory: law enforcement agencies anxious to “clear” unsolved homicides within their jurisdictions, and forensic psychologists anxious to probe the mind of a brilliant serial murderer. All petitions have thus far been rejected by prison officials, and representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union have said they would legally intervene should mind-altering chemicals be forced on Plunkett in an effort to make him confess.
Perhaps the last word on the Plunkett case was spoken by Sing Sing Warden Richard Wardlow: “The legal and psychological ramifications of this deal are beyond me, but I can tell you one thing: Martin Plunkett will never see daylight again. As sympathetic as I am to the cops with open homicides on their hands, they should give it up and be grateful the __________ is in custody. You can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.”
FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, JUNE 6, 1984: “SILENT KILLER TO ‘SPEAK’ IN CRIME AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
Literary agent Milton Alpert of M. Alpert & Associates has announced that he will be representing Martin Michael Plunkett, a convicted murderer known as the “Sexecutioner,” in the sale of his autobiographical memoir, an account that Alpert says, “pulls no punches, and is destined to be regarded as a classic text on the criminal psyche.”
Alpert, summoned to Sing Sing by a phone call from Plunkett, who had maintained absolute silence since reading a declaration of guilt at his trial in February, said that the 36-year-old killer “feels deep remorse over his actions, and wishes to expiate his guilt with the writing of this ‘cautionary’ memoir.”
Since New York law prohibits criminals from reaping financial reward from published accounts of their crimes, all monies earned from Plunkett’s “memoir” will go to the families of his victims. “Martin actually wants it that way,” Alpert stressed.
Law Enforcement agencies throughout America have already expressed great interest in reading Plunkett’s in-progress manuscript, purely from a “legal” standpoint — they think it may help them to shed light on unsolved homicides that Plunkett himself (suspected by several F.B.I. officials of being a long-term serial murderer) may have committed. As part of a “mutually beneficial reciprocal agreement,” Alpert has agreed to pass along “salient information pertaining to unsolved killings” in exchange for “official police documents to help Martin carry the narration of his book.”
The as yet untitled work will be auctioned upon its completion.
I
Los Angeles
1
Dusenberry’s estimated body count was low, and Warden Wardlow’s stone metaphor only partly accurate. Inanimate objects can yield blood, but if the transfusion is to take, the letting must be sanctioned by the object’s deepest and most logical volition. Even Milt Alpert, that eminently decent expediter of literature, had to cloak the announcement of our collaboration with justification-heavy sloganeering and words I never said. He cannot accept the fact that he will be earning 10 percent of a valediction in blood. That I feel no remorse and seek no absolution is incomprehensible to him.