So Ross Anderson, aka “Wisconsin Whipsaw” and “Four-State Hooker Hacker,” languishes in a special protective custody facility, lifting weights, reading science-fiction novels and building expensive balsa-wood airplanes. The prisoner in the cell next to his is Salvatore DiStefano, the Cleveland Mafia underboss serving fifteen years on Racketeering charges. He and Anderson talk baseball through the bars for hours each day.
Martin Plunkett resides at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He talks to no one, but is rumored to be considering writing his memoirs. He corresponds with various New York literary agents, all of whom are eager to peddle any book he writes. Offers from Hollywood — rumor has it that some studios have offered him as much as fifty thousand dollars for a twenty-page outline of his life — abound. Fifty thousand dollars divided by fifty victims comes down to a thousand dollars per head.
That’s obscene.
Plunkett wouldn’t be able to keep the money; New York State law prohibits convicted criminals from reaping the financial rewards of published or filmed accounts of their crimes, and Plunkett probably wouldn’t care — since his arrest he has brilliantly manipulated the legal and media establishments into waiting for him to tell his story his way. It is all he seems to want, and both well-intentioned legal people and literary voyeurs are drooling with anticipation.
It’s all obscene, and inimical to the American concepts of blind justice and punishment to fit the crime. It’s all obscene and points out the perfidies of free speech carried to the extreme of license. It’s all obscene and points to the need for a National Death Penalty Statute.
From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary.
6/13/84
It’s now nine months since I took Anderson and Plunkett off the streets. I’ve been busy with work — new links and chains — and with trying to reconstruct the two of them. Nothing’s coming together with the former, and with the latter it’s all coming bad.
Updating: Buckford was the brains behind prosecuting Plunkett. He built up a backlog of witnesses that never had to be tapped because of Plunkett’s statement, and he laid down attack strategies for the lackluster Westchester D.A. He’s got a big ace in the hole in the event other states ever secure extradition warrants: a series of Interstate Flight charges waiting, guaranteed to keep him in the limelight and Plunkett out of the chair. I feel ambivalent about the man and his machinations. He knows, and I know, that capital punishment is not a deterrent to violent crime, and the Southhampton aristocrat in h m considers it vulgar. Fine, but he’s also a comer in the Democratic Party, with a high-visibility racketeering strike-force job in the works, and he’s looking to keep his liberal credentials untarnished for a Senate shot somewhere down the line. He’s told me, and a half-dozen other agents, “America runs hot-cold, yin-yang, right-left, and the next time it hangs a left turn, I’ll be there to hop on and make hay.”
So Bucky Buckford’s an opportunist, and I would be too, if I weren’t so depressed. After the Anderson/Plunkett busts, I got a congratulatory telegram from the Director himself. He called my work “magnificent,” and ended the telegram with a question: “Are you staying on active duty until the maximum retirement age?” In my reply I was noncommittal, even though the question was a veiled offer of an Assistant Directorship and maybe command of the entire Criminal Division.
Here’s what all this ambivalence and depression is about:
I want to see Plunkett dead.
Anderson doesn’t bother me like Plunkett does — he actually wept when we told him two of his cousins had been murdered. But Plunkett can’t feel that, or feel anything past his own intransigence. I feel like justifying myself here, so I will. I’m not a vindictive man, I’m not a far-right ideologue, I can separate the need for justice from the lust for vengeance. And I’m not besieged by irrational guilt over not putting the Croton house under surveillance — I believed Anderson when he told me he hadn’t seen Plunkett since ’79. I still want Plunkett dead. I want him dead because he will never feel remorse or guilt or a moment’s pain or ambivalence regarding the grief he has caused, and because he is now preparing to write his life story, bankrolled by a literary agent who will be the conduit for official police documents to help him tell it, I want him dead because he is exploiting what I most believe in order to sate his own ego. I want him dead because now I don’t wonder why anymore — I just know. Evil exists.
About a month before Plunkett’s trial, Bucky Buckford and I had a confab with the Director. He told me I looked stressed out, and ordered me to take a vacation leave. Carol couldn’t go because of her classes, so I went alone. Where did I go? Janesville, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles, where Anderson and Plunkett grew up. What did I learn? Nothing except what is is, and evil exists.
I talked to about forty people who knew them. Anderson coerced younger boys into homosexual acts and tortured animals when he was a teenager. Plunkett prowled around his neighborhood looking in windows. The marijuana trafficker Anderson shot and killed in the line of duty was an old friend turned enemy, and I’m certain it was premeditated. Plunkett’s first killing almost certainly took place in San Francisco in ’74 — he was F.I. carded by the S.F.P.D. three days after a man and woman living across the street from him were ax-murdered. Checking over their school records, I found the all-American boy and a strange boy with a big brain, but no mention of anything like pivotal, life-forming trauma. Coming home, I got drunk on the plane and toasted the Dutch Reformed Church. Evil exists, prepackaged at birth, predestined) in the womb. If Plunkett and Anderson are, as Doc Seidman suggests, sadistic homosexuals, then their passion is based not on love, but on evil recognizing fellow evil. Mom, Dad, Reverend Hilliker, John Calvin, you were right. Reluctantly I salute you.
Getting home, still half in the bag, I did something I’ve never done in twenty-four years of marriage. I prowled around in Carol’s dresser. When I saw that her diaphragm wasn’t in its case, I started throwing things. After I sobered up a bit, I picked them up, and Carol came home. She didn’t say a word and I didn’t ask a thing, and lately she’s been so sweet and attentive that I still can’t say a thing. Something has to happen with her soon, but I’m afraid that if I make the first move, I’ll blow us out of the water.
Some final thoughts on Plunkett:
Sometimes I think the only thing good to come out of what he has taught me is a resolve to continue seeing evil as what it is. If my destiny is to become a prototypical hardball homicide cop, so be it. If the cost to my personal life is great, so be it. If Plunkett was a directional pointer from God, a prepackaged villain to keep me taking out killers, so be it. If the above is true, then I can reconcile the logical and methodical part of me with the new mystical and disillusioned part and move on.
The only thing about it that doesn’t float is me. I’m almost fifty years old, and I doubt if I’ve got the energy to make myself cold and hard and driven. That’s a young man’s game — and Plunkett’s.
27
June 15, 1984.
I was lying on my bunk when I heard movement on the catwalk in front of my cell. Thinking it was just another guard or administrator curious to see the silent killer in the flesh, I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Then I smelled alcohol, looked over and saw Dusenberry gripping the bars. “Talk to me,” he said.