Winkler had 120 Facebook friends. The friends section had a search engine, and on a hunch he typed in the name “Beth” and hit “Enter.” Winkler had only one friend named Beth, and her name was Beth Skye. Her profile picture was of a sunset. He clicked on it, and, like magic, Beth Skye’s page popped up.
He started to read. There was scant personal information on Beth Skye’s page. She lived in Virginia and had graduated from Dartmouth and that was it. But there were postings from friends, and by scrolling through them, he learned that she was an avid runner, a reader of mystery and thriller novels, and that she lived with two Doberman pinschers, Max and Danny, who accompanied her on her runs. There was also a posting between Heidi and Beth about going to a pistol range to practice target shooting.
The photos section wasn’t much help. Mostly photographs of sunsets and/or her running with her dogs, her face hidden from the camera. In one she was accompanied by a man in running shorts whose face was also hidden. He guessed this was her boyfriend.
He clicked on her favorites pages, and learned that she liked music by Linkin Park and Depeche Mode and her favorite books were Red Dragon, Whoever Fights Monsters, and The Hanover Killers. He knew the first two books. Red Dragon was a novel by Thomas Harris that had introduced the character Hannibal Lecter, and Whoever Fights Monsters was FBI agent Robert Ressler’s chilling account of his tracking the country’s most notorious serial killers. The last book, The Hanover Killers, was new to him.
There was nothing else on Beth Skye’s Facebook page. He exited Facebook, and went to Google, where he did a search of The Hanover Killers and discovered that it was a self-published book about the unsolved murders of two female college students that had taken place at Dartmouth College in the winter of 1999. The book had been written by a reporter named Mike Salinero, who’d covered the story for a local paper called the Valley News. The book was available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords in both paperback and e-book editions. Beth Skye’s page had said that she’d gone to Dartmouth, and he wondered if she was somehow connected to this case.
On his Kindle, he ordered the e-book edition of The Hanover Killers. A message on the page thanked him for his purchase and told him that the book was in the process of downloading.
He tucked his Kindle under his arm and went to the kitchen and poured himself an iced tea. He’d lost track of the time and saw that it was five o’clock. He’d spent the better part of his day trying to figure out how Special Agent Beth Daniels fit into this confusing puzzle, and his instincts told him he was getting close. In the living room, he put his drink on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and started to read.
Dartmouth was one of the country’s most prestigious research universities and a member of the Ivy League. Tucked away in the sleepy burg of Hanover in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley, it was a leader in medicine, engineering, and business, a place of higher learning where nothing exciting ever happened.
That had all changed on a bitterly cold Saturday evening in late January 1999. An eighteen-year-old student named Phoebe Linkletter was working a part-time job at Banana Republic at the local mall, and phoned her roommate to say she’d meet her at a popular watering hole called the Canoe Club after she got off work. When Phoebe didn’t show up at the arranged time, her roommate called the police. Three days later, Phoebe’s naked, mutilated body was found in a wooded area on the outskirts of town. The Dartmouth police conducted an investigation and hauled in Phoebe’s boyfriend, whom she’d broken up with right before the holidays. The boyfriend had a rock-solid alibi for the night of the killing, and was released.
One week later, an eighteen-year-old exchange student named Naseema Agarwai went missing. Naseema had gone to her part-time job at a yoga studio in a strip mall, and never returned to her apartment a half mile away. Two days later, her naked and disfigured body was found in a field behind the Hood Museum of Art. The crime scene was identical to the Linkletter killing, right down to the way Naseema’s body was displayed like a snow angel on the frozen ground. Believing they might be dealing with a serial killer, the police contacted the Manchester office of the FBI and asked for their help. The FBI sent two seasoned field agents to work the investigation. While the agents were on campus conducting interviews with friends and classmates of the victims, a third student was abducted. She was a sophomore named Beth Daniels, and her miraculous escape from her kidnappers would earn her the title of “The one that got away.”
Daniels was walking from class to her apartment complex when two men wearing black ski masks jumped out from behind a hedge. They began wrestling with her and tried to tie her up. Beth put up a hell of a fight, and she landed some serious blows before being subdued and thrown in the trunk of a dark sedan. In their haste to escape, her abductors did not slam the trunk with enough force, and it did not properly close. It had been a harsh winter with lots of ice, and the roads in Hanover were filled with potholes. Several miles outside of town on a quiet two-lane road, the sedan hit a pothole so hard it popped the trunk open. The jolt also woke Beth up.
“At first, I didn’t know where I was. All I could see was bright blue sky, and I started wondering if I’d died and gone to heaven,” Daniels later told the newspaper. “Then the trunk started to close and the sky disappeared. It was so scary.”
Daniels stuck her foot out and stopped the trunk from closing. The sedan had slowed down, and she decided to take her chance. Her wrists were tied behind her back, so she struggled to pull herself to a sitting position, then managed to get her feet beneath her. With the sedan still moving, she jumped out and rolled across the macadam, dislocating her shoulder and chipping two front teeth. Then she got up and fled into the woods. The sedan had pulled over, and her abductors ran after her.
“They chased me for a while, and I could hear their breathing,” Daniels was quoted as saying. “Whenever the breathing got closer, I made myself run faster. The ground was slippery, and I heard one of them fall and his partner fall on top of him. I stopped and turned around. I looked right at them, and I cursed them. Then I took off.”
With that, the killings at Dartmouth had ended. No more coeds disappeared, and life returned to normal. The FBI sent a special team to Hanover to take over the case. The team had a profiler who determined that the killers either lived in the area or had spent a great deal of time in town. This conclusion was based upon the killers’ use of back roads and geographical knowledge of the campus. Hanover had a population of seventeen thousand, and two strangers would have been noticed. The killers were local.
This revelation had sent a chill through the community. If the killers lived in the area, who were they? Did they work at the campus or in town? Perhaps they were public employees and worked at the post office or sanitation department. Or maybe they were students or teachers. It could have been anyone.
During her tussle with her abductors, Beth had managed to rake her fingernails across one of the men’s faces. The police forensics department had gotten a tiny piece of this skin from Beth, and turned it over to the FBI, who had run it against a database of known serial killers. It had turned up nothing, and everyone had forgotten about it. But then an unusual thing happened. Men living in Hanover came to the police department and gave samples of hair or saliva so that their DNA could be run against the abductor’s. The men did this to clear themselves so that their friends and family would know they were not one of the monsters that had taken two innocent young lives.