Stone Cold Dead (46 page)

The next eighteen months catalogued a string of late-night visits to her room by her stepfather. He watched her bathing, made her “do things” to him, “did things” to her, and threatened her to keep quiet. As the months passed, the frequency of his visits increased, but she was no more descriptive in her accounts. Just the same vague words like “again” and “things.” I found at least sixty distinct occasions in the diary where she wrote about his visits. She described how he talked of “lying” with her as soon as she was old enough, but for now, he was satisfied with the “disgusting things he made me do.”

In May 1960, Darleen wrote that she’d met an older boy who liked her a lot. Wilbur Burch was eighteen and had a car. “Wilbur’s a simple boy,” she wrote, “but he’s going to get me out of here. He’s going into the army in Arizona. I sure would like to see Arizona.” Darleen went on to explain that Wilbur was crazy for the “tricks” she did with him. She wrote that he fell head over heels for her after that.

I put the diary down and downed another drink before I could continue. Drawing a deep breath, I resumed. Later that summer, Joey Figlio emerged as Darleen’s steady and best hope for escape. She wrote that he was “a little weird,” but he loved her and “had a plan” to take her away from the farm and her stepfather. Wilbur had turned out to be “a dud” and “kinda slow.” By all accounts, Darleen had never shown her “tricks” to Joey, who seemed to love her anyway. She wrote that they planned to run away and get married.

But in September, Darleen forgot all about Joey Figlio and gushed for weeks about Mr. Russell, the dreamy music teacher. She fantasized about marrying him and moving out of her nightmare and into his dream. There was nothing in the diary to suggest that Ted Russell shared any of her interest. In fact, after about a month and a half, Darleen pronounced herself over Mr. Russell, who was kind of boring and had a way of wrinkling his mouth that “looks dumb and annoys me.” I knew what she meant. Ted Russell had a funny habit of pressing his lips together on the left side of his mouth for no apparent reason. Darleen was right. It did look dumb, and it annoyed me, too.

From that point to the end, Joey Figlio was her man.

“I guess I love Joey,” she wrote in early December 1960. “He loves me, and I’d rather marry him than that dolt Wilbur Burch.”

She even mentioned Louis Brossard. In reference to the rumors about Darleen and Ted Russell, the assistant principal interviewed her to find out if something was going on. She told him there was nothing between her and the music teacher.

“Mr. Brossard is kind of gross. I don’t like talking to him. But he’s been nice to me.”

In early December, Darleen related her attempt to get money from Ted Russell and Louis Brossard. Russell caved immediately when she threatened to say he’d had his way with her and left her pregnant. Brossard got really angry, refused, and advised her to pray to Jesus for guidance.

Darleen continued to mark the visits from her stepfather with sickening regularity. By the end, she would simply write, “Again” and nothing more.

I threw the diary down on the end table and hung my head. In the gloom of my apartment, the night had closed in around me as I read the wretched account of what he’d done to her. Two hours had passed. Two hours of revolting accounts of the worst crimes I could imagine against a child. What dies inside a man to make him do such things? How far from decency must he turn to lay his hands on a girl that way? How black must his soul be? I could imagine all manner of cruelty and selfishness and even understand them to a degree when compared to molesting a child. Dick Metzger was a monster. My instinct about him had been right all along. And right behind him was the despicable Wilbur Burch. Child molesters, both of them. Base and worthless human beings. I would be happy to do my part to help send them both away forever.

I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. And when I dozed off, terrible nightmares invaded my head. Horrible visions that I won’t repeat. Dreams that twisted my insides until I tore at my pillow, gnashed at its cover with my teeth, and wept for Darleen Hicks and Geraldine Duffy. I promised justice for them both. And that’s when I realized how confused and emotional I’d become. I was hunting two different fiends, and I didn’t know what to think, whom to accuse, which to hate more. Dick Metzger was a lowlife child molester. I had proof of that. But now I needed to prove that either he or Louis Brossard was a killer as well.

I took two hours to write the article that would blacken Dick Metzger’s name with the foulest tar I could conjure. Even if he never faced prison for his crimes, he would forever be known as a monster who’d molested his daughter. My heart raced as I detailed his abuse of a pubescent girl. For obvious reasons, the paper would never publish the ugly words I wanted to write. But I made sure the perversion and depravity came through in every sentence.

Once I’d finished, I photographed several of the more telling passages, including Darleen’s plans to escape with Joey and Wilbur. I made sure to document many of the nauseating entries about her stepfather. I might even find one or two where the language was moderate enough to be printed along with my article as powerful visual evidence.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1961

It was six. I showered and dressed. By seven, I was sitting outside Frank Olney’s office, waiting for him to arrive. In my purse was the diary. In my head, I was turning my facts and theories over and over, looking for the answer that was so elusive. It seems trite, but I compared the impasse to the hardest crossword puzzles I’d ever solved. I recalled how they’d stumped me, then suddenly a crack appeared, giving way to a trickle, then the flood gates opened, and the game was won, as suddenly and unexpectedly as a dam bursting. But this was no crossword puzzle. The clues had not been devised to lead to an eventual solution. Quite the opposite. There was a dearth of clues, and the killer was more interested in burying evidence than engaging in an intellectual game.

Frank finally lumbered into the office at eight fifteen. He hung his coat on the stand and looked at me.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, his expression betraying a premonition that I had a very good reason for the early start.

“Can we talk inside?”

I laid out the diary on his desk, and he eyed it with dread.

“I see you took the liberty of breaking the lock,” he said, reaching for it. “Okay, give me the abridged version.”

“Darleen planned to run off with Joey Figlio. She collected money from various people.”

“That’s nice,” he said, thumbing through the first few pages. “But we already knew that. What’s the punch line?”

“Dick Metzger had been molesting her for two years.”

The sheriff groaned as I filled him in and showed him some of the more telling passages. He turned green as he read the chilling, almost nonchalant descriptions written in Darleen’s hand. “Last night he made me do it again,” was the one that prompted Frank to slam his right hand down on his desk and rise to his feet. He grabbed his coat and hat from the stand, then reached into his desk for his gun.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going to haul that son of a bitch in here.”

“Why are you taking your gun?”

Frank stared at me, face impassive. “Because I’m hoping he gives me a reason to shoot him.”

It was ten o’clock when I presented Charlie Reese with my story and the photos I’d rushed through the lab moments earlier. He read my copy carefully, then examined the photos one by one. When he’d finished, he pushed back in his chair and sighed.

“The world is a terrible place for people like Darleen Hicks,” he said. “I’ve never understood how a human being can be so rotten as to do that to a child.”

“Then you’ll print it?” I asked.

Charlie looked up at me. “No, Ellie. We can’t print this. Not in this form anyway. Ours is a family newspaper. We can’t write that her father made her do . . . Oh, God, it makes me sick to think about it.”

“How would you write it then?” I demanded, my hackles rising.

“Well, if the sheriff arrests him, we can say what the charges are. But we can’t give this kind of detail.”

“Can we at least print a photograph of the diary? Here, where she says, ‘He came to my room again last night.’”

Charlie gazed at the picture for a long time. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll have to run it by Artie.”

At noon, I phoned Frank Olney for an update. He told me that Dick Metzger was cooling his heels in a cell downstairs on suspicion of statutory rape, sodomy, corruption of a minor, and child molestation.

“What about Wilbur Burch?” I asked.

“He’s still in city jail,” said Frank. “But I spoke to the DA. He says that Burch is under nineteen, and, therefore, is considered an underage offender. Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to pay for this.”

This was crazy. The newspaper refused to publish the salient details of Dick Metzger’s crimes against nature, and the state considered a nineteen-year-old child molester underage. Plenty of folks were looking out for the rapists and the molesters, but no one seemed to care for the fifteen-year-old girl.

“Did Don say anything about Metzger?” I asked.

“You’re not going to like it,” said Frank. “He said that the diary alone probably isn’t enough to charge him.”

“What?”

“The language in the diary is too vague, he says. The girl never actually spelled out what he was doing to her or what he was making her do. And Don says the diary is hearsay anyway and inadmissible as evidence.”

I swore at Frank down the line, and he urged me to calm down. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “I’m on your side here. And, though I shouldn’t be telling this to the press, I took the opportunity to bang Metzger’s head into the doorframe of my cruiser when I was putting him inside.”

“That seems to be your usual way of helping criminals into cars,” I said, remembering how he done the same to Frankie Ralston.

“Not officially. But I can tell you it felt damn good.” He paused. “For me, not him. He swore a blue streak at me, and he’s got a nice shiner under his right eye. Oh, and I gave him a ticket for an expired registration on his truck, too.”

Sometimes I wished I were as big as Frank Olney. I would have loved to bounce Dick Metzger’s head off the car door. And maybe slam the door two or three times more on his head while I was at it.

“So when do you have to let him out?”

“I’ll release him in a couple of hours. I just don’t have enough to keep him locked up.”

“What can we do, Frank?”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said. “But can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you think Dick Metzger killed Darleen?”

I took my time before answering. Not that I was considering the question at all, but I was trying to find an answer that would derail what I assumed Frank was going to say next. Finally I had to admit that, for all the hatred I harbored for him, I did not think Dick Metzger had murdered his stepdaughter.

“Then let me tell you something that I think you should consider. Darleen is gone. Metzger can’t harm her anymore. But there is a murderer on the loose, and we both want to catch him. I suggest you swallow your disgust and disappointment and concentrate on finding something that will stick to Brossard.”