Evil Season (5 page)

 

 

Michelle Andersen, a coworker of Vicki Krone's, had worked at Admiral Travel for thirteen years, a workplace with little turnover. Many of the employees had been there for that long, and longer. In comparison, Joyce Wishart had only been in Sarasota for a couple of years and was still a relative newcomer.

Andersen admitted to not being a close friend of the victim's. Which wasn't to say that Andersen and Wishart weren't friendly. They greeted each other, “Hi, how are ya?”

Of course, Palm Avenue had beauty, glamour, and palm trees—but it wasn't all fancy-schmancy, either. There was a funkier edge to the big picture.

All of those art galleries weeded through a scattering of hungry artists—some bohemians of uncertain hygiene—all eager to find wall space for their work. Andersen figured the killer could be any one of them.

Joyce Wishart had the wall space and was not a big believer in negative space. Cluttered and busy was more like it. She had a lot of artwork displayed in her gallery and dealt with many artists, some strangers from heaven-knows-where.

There were even homeless people who were semi-regulars along the block, but they were the same ones all the time, so folks learned to pay little mind. Now it was: “Should I have been afraid of that guy all along?” Andersen sometimes saw the same—pardon the expression—“bum” three times a day, stumbling down the street. Would she ever be able to look at him the same after all this?

After the murder the cops came and didn't leave. “They were there for a long time,” Andersen recalled, and by that she meant
weeks
.

One part of her felt freaked out by the persistent heavy police presence, a steady reminder of the nightmare; the other part was reassured. It was easier to get through her day when protection was only a few feet away.

The seemingly never-ending news stories on the murder, hinting at the ghastliness of the crime without being specific, made Andersen's morbid imagination go wild. She found herself wondering what it was like for the cleanup crew. What mind-numbingly horrendous things would the crew have to see and do—just so that life could
go on
in that room.

And what of the poor first responders? Joyce wasn't found for several days and her remains must've been an assault on the senses by the time her corpse was discovered. What they must have seen! Whatever the ghastly secret, they knew firsthand. It was burned into their memories. How could a person ever sleep again?

She had heard that the body was posed to resemble one of the pieces of art, but no one knew which painting or drawing it was, allowing imaginations to percolate.

Years later, Michelle Andersen's memories hadn't faded.

“It was so close! I mean really, really close!” she exclaimed.

There were popular events going on at the time, a ritzy film series and an art festival. The town was teeming. So there was an exceptional amount of pedestrian traffic along Palm Avenue. Businesses kept their doors propped open, hoping strollers would wander in.

Even when there weren't tourists to be wooed, security was never tight. Even on days when the weather might be inclement and the doors to the businesses kept shut, they still weren't locked. The proprietor would just put a little bell up on top to tinkle the news when someone entered.

Not that Joyce Wishart's end of the strip was the most traveled. Since it was at the west end of the street, not that many tourists strolled by. If they went there, chances were good that it was their planned destination.

Andersen was there late on that Friday. How scary was that? She was in and out on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday, she noticed that it was odd that Joyce Wishart hadn't opened the gallery door. Andersen clicked on that—weird, no Joyce—and then moved on to something else. Andersen worked long hours that week. She worked her regular job, and then at night she made arrangements for the film festival, which had her working with directors. She'd probably been working alone in the office when it happened, just on the other side of the driveway. She thought out loud: “I'd been going back and forth in the parking garage alone. . . .” There must have been long hours that weekend when Andersen worked alone at night and Wishart's desecrated body lay posed only a few feet away.

After noting her absence during the weekend, Andersen didn't give Joyce another thought, until Wednesday, when all of a sudden there were cop cars everywhere, detectives prowling with a cool efficiency “across our roof and in the bushes.” They came into the travel agency, where Andersen worked, asking, “The owner of the gallery next door was murdered, anyone seen anything over the weekend?”
No, no, no.
Then came a second influx of large vehicles and activity when the news media caught wind and came swarming.

No work was getting done on Palm Avenue. Folks were out in the street talking a mile a minute about what happened. Some in tears, some just stunned, their eyes a little too wide. Some felt ill. The smell, now that they knew what it was, was so damned
sinister
! Vague gossip about the crime scene spread. Someone thought Joyce might be missing a body part. Snippets of police conversation had been overheard. They were looking for something that didn't just belong to her, but was
part of her
.

No one knew the details, but it had to be bad. The Provenance Gallery's windows were covered to protect the crime scene's privacy, and they stayed covered for a long time.

Andersen had a friend, maybe more of an acquaintance, who was a cop. She asked him what it was like in Joyce's gallery. The police officer said, “Michelle, you don't even want to know.” She'd known a lot of cops in her life, and she recognized his tone. Her stomach raced, spun, and dropped. She felt the little hairs at the nape of her neck prickle.

She would never be able to go to the parking garage alone again. It was too dark and creepy—a world where psycho killers lurked in shadows.

Andersen felt intense grief, of course, but news of the murder also overwhelmed her with her own raw vulnerability. That feeling was common with her neighbors. She thought about how the storefronts on Palm, built as they were with no back doors, could turn into a trap. She remembered the shock—and the indignity—felt by the Palm Avenue crowd. Sarasota was special and this sort of thing didn't happen here. This—and it shouldn't even need to be mentioned—was
not
Middle America!

Some wondered if keeping the details of the murder from the public was such a good idea. “It leaves your imagination going crazy,” said a Palm Avenue neighbor, interior designer Sherry Simons. “We will all feel better when they disclose how it happened.”

The shops along Palm Avenue were thinking in terms of security for the first time. Sherry Simons's boss, Sally A. Trout, said that she grew up in Sarasota and it had always been one of those charmed cities, relatively untouched by modern dangers.

“No one locked their doors,” she recalled. “Mom would take us all to the beach and just drop us off. It was an easy time. We were all so innocent.”

She thought back to all of the times she'd been in her office alone. It had never occurred to her in a million years that she was in danger.

She did recall—well, it wasn't really a problem, but rather an annoyance from homeless people. They would move up and down the street looking for handouts. A lot of them were familiar; but every once in a while, there would be one who was creepier than the others.

Now everything was different. She planned to install a buzzer on the front door and keep the back door locked at all times—precautions that had not previously occurred to her.

Trout's interior design space was only a couple of doors down from Wishart's gallery. Sally herself had done business with Joyce. She bought a painting, only two days before her murder.

Trout remembered vividly the shock that Wednesday when all hell broke loose on Palm Avenue. She had been working with a client, when all of a sudden it seemed as if an ambulance and police cars were coming from all directions. She went outside to see what was going on; eventually word got around that Joyce Wishart had been murdered. Curiosity seekers couldn't get close to the gallery. The front of the business was monitored, to keep pedestrians from accidentally contaminating the crime scene.

Trout had heard the rumors that there was a psycho killer at work, but she didn't give them any credibility. “I can't believe that this was a random crime,” she said.

But if it wasn't random, that would mean that Wishart had an enemy, which was every bit as difficult to believe.

In the days following the murder, a dark cloud hovered over the street. It was a sadder and quieter world. No one spoke loudly. Neighbors, who had shouted greetings across the street only days before, now settled for a silent wave. In the nearby grocery store, where people once conversed at a distance, neighbors now stood closer and exchanged pleasantries in hushed tones.

The gallery and travel agency were not on the busiest sections of Palm, because there were no restaurants on that side of the street. The Provenance's end of the strip was quieter and darker to begin with. After the murder the block was deserted, and there was a tainted feeling to the air.

 

 

Like Michelle Andersen, Joyce Wishart's friend Lois Schulman felt positively
traumatized
by the murder.

“I've been a nervous wreck,” Schulman said. “I have been talking to God, asking that he hold her in his arms. Think of how horrible the end must have been, looking at her killer in the eyes.” Schulman had a personal friend who was a psychic, a gifted man. She was sure he would do whatever he could to help the investigation.

Also playing amateur detective was Nancy Hall, the Bay Plaza condominium manager. According to one coworker, Hall thought she was going to solve the mystery for the police. Compared to Wishart's other neighbors at work, Hall was very chatty on the subject of the murder.

Police quickly filled in the victim's biography. Joyce was nineteen years old in 1961, when she married twenty-two-year-old truck driver Robert Wishart in Cincinnati.

The couple had four children, two boys and two girls. The youngest was seven when she filed for divorce in 1981, accusing her husband of adultery and abuse.

The victim's longtime Columbus, Ohio, neighbors, Don and Bonnie McPeek, were very helpful, telling police how Wishart metamorphosed from a housewife and single mom into a career woman.

It was a transformation to be reckoned with—inspirational, even—and the McPeeks helped as often as possible. Don fixed Joyce's car for free and Bonnie offered babysitting services after school let out.

Wishart was not going to allow material matters, such as the fact that she didn't have a lot of money or possessions, deter her from her goal.

“She didn't have a whole lot. She was scrounging the bottom of the barrel, trying to keep her head above water. It would have been easy for her to give up—but she never did,” Don said.

“She went through a lot of trials and tribulations,” Bonnie added. “But I tell you, that girl pulled herself up by her bootstraps and got through it.”

Her financial problems were only compounded when her ex-husband failed to keep up with his child-support payments of $240 per month. She had to take him to court to avoid losing her house to creditors.

She took night and weekend college classes at Dublin College, a small private college near her home in Columbus, and earned her first college degree, an associate's, at age fifty.

She attended Dublin during the years 1990 through 1993. In 1991, she began to date a fellow student named Jim Beauchamp, who was her boyfriend until 1996. But even after they broke up, they remained good friends.

Her bachelor's degree was in business administration and came from Ohio Dominican University. She subsequently earned a master's in executive management from Ashland University. She clearly had her future mapped out. Her master's thesis was in the economics of running an art gallery.

She and her children had competed to see who could get the best grades. While Joyce was excelling in college, her kids made the honor roll on their own, both in high school and college.

As is true with any brood, some of the kids flew farther from the coop than others. Friends said that Wishart's two oldest children, Scott Wishart, who was forty-one years old and lived in South Carolina at the time of his mother's murder, and daughter Kirsten Whitehouse, thirty-nine, who was still in Ohio, were not close with their mother. Joyce's younger children, Patty Wishart, thirty-two, and James “Jamie” Wishart, thirty, had remained close and visited their mother regularly in Florida. Patty, in fact, had been planning to move in with her mother sometime during the spring of 2004.

Joyce had started her own marketing consultancy called Portfolio Place in 1990. Soon thereafter she was elected president of the Columbus Chapter of the American Marketing Association. In July 1998, she was the subject of a profile in the business section of the
Columbus Dispatch
newspaper. She told the reporter that Portfolio Place—for which she was general manager—provided strategic planning, finance, marketing, operations and sales plans, advertising design and placement, pre-press and print production, training, public relations, and communications programs for both profit business clients and nonprofit organizations.

Asked for a quick review of her résumé, Wishart said that she started with Chemlawn Corp. in marketing, and moved over to its subsidiary, Chemlawn Services, where she worked her way up to national marketing director by the time she left in 1989. She moved to CheckFree Corporation and worked in a similar capacity until September of 1990, when she left to start Portfolio Place.

Asked what her first job was, she said, “Running errands for neighbors.” What did that job teach her? Well, first of all, she learned that her neighbors had more money than she did. She was a kid at the time and it was a revelation that when she did the same types of jobs for neighbors that she did at home, she received a lot more money than an allowance. “It was probably my earliest introduction to a free-market economy,” she commented.

What was her management philosophy? “Tell me what you can do, not what you can't do,” she replied. The biggest mistake she made during the early stages of her business career was being trustful. She'd been an innocent and believed that because she was honest, everyone was honest—and nothing could have been further from the truth. Also, she assumed that everyone had the same perseverance that she had, and this also proved to be false. “There are so many people who have the best of intentions,” she said, “but never follow through.” It didn't make them bad people, just ineffective people—these were folks who had poor time-management skills, who either overbooked their days or grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete a task.

How did she compensate for her overestimate of peoples' honesty and stick-to-itiveness? “I learned to put everything in writing,” she explained. “It saves so much confusion. Being able to concisely state terms, dates, activities, exceptions, et cetera, in writing with required dates to be met usually resolves the issue. Sometimes people just need a frame of reference or a date to work toward.” She understood that marketing was a business that never allowed one to rest on her laurels. She constantly had to educate herself to the latest trends and techniques or risk being passed by the competition.

What was her biggest complaint about Columbus? “Clouds and orange barrels—and not necessarily in that order,” she said.

She was asked where her favorite place to business lunch was. Being diplomatic, she said there were far too many to choose just one. She did, however, list the ingredients that make a restaurant a suitable place to conduct business: “The important thing for a business lunch, though, is that the place is not exceedingly noisy, the wait staff is not interrupting your conversation every few minutes to ask if everything is okay, and the table is larger than the size of the plate.”

She said that she enjoyed travel and golf as relaxation. Her most recent vacation, she told the reporter, was to Sarasota, Florida, where “the Gulf and the golf” were both great.

As a closing note she said that her neighbors still had more money than she did, but at least she was closing the gap.

She was asked what her “dream job” would be, and she answered, “I'd like to be the owner of an art gallery in a warm, sunny climate.”

 

 

Joyce vacationed in the Sarasota area before she moved to Florida permanently in the late 1990s. She sold her house in Ohio and moved to Manatee County in suburbia. After a stint doing contract work with NovaCare Employee Services in Bradenton, she landed a $45,000 per year job as the marketing director for the Asolo Repertory Theatre, a job she held from August 1999 until 2001. In addition to good money, the job served as a letter of introduction to a “who's who” of the area's arts community. It was a tough club to get into. You didn't need a lot of money, but you did need to pay your dues—and that meant community involvement.

Joyce Wishart's friend Lois Schulman described it this way: “You have to do things for charities that need your help. You have to give away your talents to make Sarasota a better place.”

Joyce had no problem with that. She volunteered with Artists Helping Artists and served on the county's Arts Council. She further ingratiated herself with the ladies by being quick with numbers. She became the go-to gal for anyone with an accounting problem. She could take an idea, whether it was hers or someone else's, and project the economic feasibility.

Anyone who might have thought Joyce, being a divorcée from the Midwest, might have trouble fitting in with the artsy crowd in Sarasota had it backward. Her friend Denise Roberts, who was the executive director of the Sarasota nonprofit Family Law Connection, remembered meeting Joyce in 2001 and thinking how elegant she was, maybe too elegant and too cultured for the group. “She was
Vogue
and I was Target,” Roberts remembered thinking when they met.

But Joyce made everyone feel comfortable. It was as if she had always been one of the ladies of Sarasota culture. She seldom talked about life in Ohio. It was as if her first fifty years hadn't happened. When she started over, she started over. The ladies frequently complained about their husbands or their ex-husbands, but Joyce did not join in on those conversations.

It was after leaving the Asolo that she opened up her own art gallery. That was September 2001. The opening earned a blurb in
Sarasota Magazine
. Marsha Fottler, in her “Shop Talk” column, said Provenance, opening in October, was perfect for those seeking fine art at discount prices: “
Now collectors who are downsizing, redecorating, or editing their inventory have a place to send their fine art for resale,”
Fottler wrote
. “And buyers will be able to acquire original paintings, sculpture and photography at big savings.
”

A consignment gallery accepted works from artists or collectors. Wishart determined prices by doing Internet research. If there was a sale, she kept half the money.

The pieces on display at the Provenance revealed a curator of eclectic taste. Wishart chose works she liked, seemingly regardless of category. There were lithographs, etchings, watercolors, European paintings, modern sculpture, and American folk art.

Although she was relatively new to the community, she fit right in with the half-dozen ladies of the town who were at the heart of the city's cultural scene.

She even hosted monthly get-togethers, serving drinks and dinner for the ladies right there in her gallery, where the gals would gossip, talk about their lives, and exchange recipes. There was always candlelight, and Wishart prepared the meal right there in her kitchenette.

According to Kathryn Shea, one of the women, Wishart seldom led the conversation, but she did act as moderator. She took particular delight in the group's lampooning of then–commander in chief, President Bush.

Fottler told the
Herald-Tribune,
“I never heard her be critical of anyone. Some of us are not like that. She would always try to find a way to resolve an issue, or to see it from a different perspective.”

Less than a month after opening her own art gallery, Wishart learned that she was battling breast cancer. She told the ladies over dinner.

“I'm going to beat it,” she said at the time, and she did.

During her chemotherapy treatments her friends pitched in, giving her rides to and from the doctors, and keeping the gallery open when she was too weak to work.

Her hair, naturally brown, fell out. She bought a red wig, and then purchased clothes to go with it. When people told her how good she looked, she would reply, “You should see me in the morning. I look in the mirror and say, ‘My God, where did the alien come from?'”

There were times when she was so weak that her friends feared that she wasn't going to make it, and she endured a full year of treatments before she was declared cancer free. Friends recalled that one of the pleasant aspects of her ordeal was that her dark brown hair grew back a beautiful red color after chemotherapy—seemingly in imitation of the wig she'd been wearing.

Of course, a beautician may have been responsible, but the notion that nature had given her red hair to compensate for her ordeal became a part of her story—and she conveniently continued wearing all of the clothes she'd bought to go with her wig.

During one of her monthly dinners, Wishart admitted that the gallery was not turning a profit, nor did Wishart anticipate that it would for its first five years. During the past year she had been trying to expand her business, which she hoped one day to franchise. At the time of the murder, Wishart was preparing for Arts Day. She had spoken on the phone to some of her old friends in Ohio and had expressed her excitement.