The Devil's Closet (24 page)

The media had a field day with the case. Front-page headlines screamed that Carl James Malone was the most notorious child murderer in history.

However, on the positive side, the country had been released from Carl’s grip of terror, and parents across the nation breathed a sigh of relief.

A total of eleven sets of bones were found buried in Malone’s backyard. Some of the items and clothing found with the bones indicated that several of them were more than twenty years old. All the sets of bones were found with red ribbons on them or nearby.

Each week, a new identification came back, putting a face and name to the bones. There was even a family I remembered hearing about when I was young.

In 1984 in the small town of Holland, Michigan, nine-year-old Bethany Simpson was playing kickball with a group of neighborhood kids about a hundred feet from her house. Bethany stayed behind to the kick the ball around after her friends left and was never seen again. She would’ve been close to my age by now. Her parents were still alive, having raised Bethany’s two younger sisters. Over twenty years later, the news was devastating. Beth-any’s bones, like all the others, were found with the distinctive red ribbon.

In 1992, six-year-old Darcy Fulmer had been trying out her new roller skates on the driveway of her home in Olive Hill, Kentucky. Her mother went inside to get a sweater and found Darcy gone when she returned. The roller skates were buried with Darcy. Her mother, who was raising her alone, had died several years before of ovarian cancer. Relatives told of how Darcy’s mother had prayed for death so she could see her daughter again.

One of the missing children I remember most was eight-year-old Carla Dumont. Her father was the mayor of the town of London, Ohio. Carla had been taken right out of her bed while she slept at night, just like Brooklyn Phillips. It became statewide news. It happened in 1982, and I was the same age as Carla at the time. I remembered being scared by it and my older brother Tony teasing me that the man was going to come get me. Carla’s mother was sent to a mental hospital a year later, spending five years there until she committed suicide in 1988. Carla’s father remained in London. They had no other children.

The rest were the same, different names, different cities, but all little girls whose lives ended, destroying the lives of their surviving family members and friends. The FBI estimated that Carl had possibly killed up to forty children. They had to go back and track his whereabouts from the time he became an adult, and they compared all abductions to the area he was staying in at the time. We knew most of those bodies would never be found. But we would try. Every family of a missing child deserved some kind of answer. It would take a long time to close out this case.

I found myself in the media spotlight. I had job offers from major television networks to be their crime consultant. I had teaching offers and radio offers. I turned them all down with the exception of one, a publisher who asked me to write my story. I haven’t said yes yet, but I thought it was something that could be therapeutic while I still kept my job.

Once I could walk on my own, I had Michael take me to see Naomi, who was still in intensive care but doing much better. Coop hadn’t left her side for a minute. It had been only two weeks, but her appearance had improved drastically, with the exception of her eyes. They were still swollen and black from the blow to her head.

With the aid of a cane, I hobbled into the room, carrying a bouquet of flowers and some magazines for her. She was thrilled to see me and started to sit up until Coop gently but firmly told her to lie back down. She could talk just fine from that position.

I had called every day to talk to her and Coop, but seeing her in person was different. Coop and Michael left to go for coffee while Naomi thanked me for the flowers. I pulled a chair over and put it next to her bed so we could be closer.

“It’s good to see you finally. You look much, much better.”

I saw the tears well up in her black, puffy eyes. “CeeCee, I wanted to tell you this in person.” She started to cry. “I’m so sorry. It was all my fault. I’m so sorry I called you down there like that. You must know he made me do it!”

I was surprised she even remembered. “Naomi, don’t you ever apologize for that, understand? You didn’t have a choice. None of us did. He had it all planned out, and you did what you had to. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

“Something else, CeeCee. Thank you. You saved my life.”

“I owed you one. Remember the bullet you took for me on Murder Mountain? Speaking of which, exactly how much do you remember about Carl Malone?”

She remembered most of it, up until when Carl hit her at the Falls. So much for the doctor’s predictions. She’d been leaving her apartment for work that morning when she was hit in the back of the head and knocked out cold. It wasn’t the blow that crushed her skull, though.

She woke up in the trunk of a car and it was a few minutes after she felt the car stop that Carl, or at that time Jim Carlson, opened the trunk. Brooklyn was standing with him, and he had a gun to her head. They were by a pay phone. Carl told Naomi to do whatever she could to make me go down there. Or else she and Brooklyn would die immediately.

“He said you got away, and it wasn’t going to happen again,” Naomi said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I.”

Naomi had hoped that if she told me the story about Coop, I would give him a piece of my mind before I left, and that’s when I’d find out it wasn’t true. She knew me well, and what she’d done was smart.

“I figured as soon as you got off the phone with me, you’d at least get him and make him come down with you. That’s why I threw in the part about harming myself. It just so happens my timing was perfect and Coop was out eating breakfast,” she said sarcastically.

After she made the call, Carl put her back in the trunk. She wasn’t released again until they got to the falls. He walked behind her and Brooklyn with the gun on them both, all the way on the trail and during the climb to the top. He had taken her gun away after hitting her at her apartment.

She didn’t think the beating was part of his plan, but when she found the right moment, she tried to push him off the side. He overpowered her. He started kicking her in the face, and that was the last thing she remembered.

“I kind of remember seeing you standing on the edge of the falls, but at the time I was so out of it I had no idea what was going on or where I was,” she said. “Did all that really happen?”

I nodded.

“I can’t say I really remember much of anything after he beat the life out of me on that godforsaken cliff.”

“Which is probably for the best.” She obviously hadn’t seen us fall over the edge or Michael snap Carl’s neck.

With the promise of visiting within the next week or so, Michael and I left. He was going to drop me off at home before going back to his hotel. He had packed the few things I had left in his room before I was released from the hospital. My mother was staying with me and the girls for a while, helping out while I recuperated. Eric was at his parents’.

I tried to hold it together for her sake, but watching her made me break down. I wished at that point that I would’ve been able to deal with Jordan being pregnant and their relationship so we wouldn’t have to get divorced and hurt our children, but I couldn’t.

Watching Selina so devastated, I even thought I’d be able to put Michael on hold for a while if I had to, but I couldn’t get over the impending baby. I could only imagine how she was going to react to the news of Jordan’s pregnancy.

Ultimately, like most children, Selina was resilient and accepted it. She pouted and was very quiet for a few days before telling me that she was okay with everything and that “we’ll all be fine, Mom.” Her maturity at ten years old never ceased to amaze me.

Michael was concerned about the girls and how they took it. I think he knew I was taking it hard and tried not to push anything. When I first got home from the hospital, we went almost a week without seeing each other, a period he called “excruciatingly painful.”

“Just open it.”

I pulled out a large, old-looking photo of a little girl walking with a policeman. They looked like they were in a field by some woods. The little girl was holding the policeman’s hand, and they were walking away from the camera. The little girl had turned her head, looking back, when the photo was taken, giving a clear view of her face. A face I recognized instantly.

“Selina?” I flipped the photo over, looking for a date, since I had never seen the photo before. A growing sense of dread and remembrance of the face told me it wasn’t Selina. “Where’d you get this?”

Michael spoke; my dad was pale. “We got it at Carl Malone’s the day they searched his house. CeeCee, it’s not Selina.” He paused. “It’s you.”

I flipped the photo back over and looked at it, my heart racing. He was right: it was me, and I was about eight years old. The policeman I was walking with was my father.

“I don’t understand.” I looked back and forth between Michael and my father. “I don’t remember this picture. You say Carl Malone had it? How the hell did he get ahold of it?”

“He took the picture, CeeCee.”

“Would one of you two please explain to me what this is all about?” I stood up from the couch. “You’re scaring me.”

“CeeCee, when we found that picture, we thought it was of one of the victims. It took us a while to enhance the photo enough to see the police patch on your dad’s arm since his back was to the camera and we couldn’t identify him visually. But at the department, your uncle Mitch identified you immediately. That’s when I called your dad. I’ll let him take it from here.” Michael looked over at my father.

My dad stood and came over to the couch and sat me down next to him.

“Honey, you don’t remember anything about that day, do you?”

“No.”

“I do, every detail. It’s haunted me for years, ever since it happened.” And then my dad told me the story of the picture.

It was summer, about six months before Carla Dumont disappeared. My brother, Tony, and I were playing in a creek that was on the far side of a field across the street from our house. A fairly busy road ran along the creek. My father, who had just gotten home from work and was still in uniform, looked out across the field, trying to see me and Tony. He was always worried we would get too close to the road.

Not being able to spot us, he was on his way inside to change clothes when he heard Tony screaming. He saw Tony screaming and running across the field toward the house.

“Every nerve in my body lit up, CeeCee. I didn’t see you, so I knew something was wrong. Tony had a look on his face like I’d never seen before.”

My dad said he started sprinting toward Tony, and met him halfway in the field. Tony, out of breath and terrified, told him what was happening.

Tony and I had been collecting rocks out of the creek bed when he had to use the bathroom. According to him, every time he would go behind a tree, I would yell, “I see you!” So he went farther back into the woods that ran along the other side of the field.

It was when he came out of the woods that he saw the man pulling me up the small hill by my arm to a waiting car on the side of the road. I was screaming bloody murder. I was a cop’s kid and had been taught all about stranger danger. Not only was I screaming, I was trying to bite the man’s arm. By the time my dad got there, other cars were stopping on the road, seeing and hearing the commotion, so the man let go, jumped in his car, and drove away.

They only got a description of a blue car and a white man wearing sunglasses and a red baseball cap.

“I looked for him for years after that, CeeCee.”

The on-duty police officers were called and an extensive search of the area began, but they found nothing. My dad said I was hysterical by the time he got to me, and I couldn’t tell him much more than what Tony said. We stayed by the creek for a good half an hour, speaking to the officers who were trying to get a description from me. Then we walked across the field toward home, my dad holding my hand.

“He had to have driven around, parked somewhere, then hid in the woods. That picture was taken from the woods.” He rubbed his temples. “I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I’ve never been that scared in my life. When Michael brought this picture to me and told me where he got it, I thought my heart was gonna stop.”

“You’re the only one who got away from him, CeeCee, and it angered him in a way none of us would ever be able to understand,” Michael said softly. “For the last twenty-six years he’s looked forward to this. I didn’t tell you this earlier, but your high school yearbook and a cell phone bill that he apparently took from your mailbox were found with the photo. That’s how he got your number.”

My senior year, my friends and I had all taken a day off to go hiking and drink beer at Hemlock Falls. Similar to Lyon’s Falls but not as high, it was also in the state forest area. I was the only one who didn’t go up to the top. There was a large photo taken of everyone standing on top, with me at the bottom. The photo wound up in the yearbook with a caption underneath. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it poked fun at me for being scared of heights and staying grounded. That’s how he knew my fears.

“After that day, CeeCee, you were scared to leave the yard for a while, but you got over it. You never mentioned it again, so I thought you had forgotten. Even when the little girl was taken from down in London later that year, you never brought it up.”

I was almost one of Carl Malone’s victims as a child. Even as I sat and listened to them both say it, I didn’t believe. Without saying a word to either of them, I walked over to the phone and called my brother in Columbus.

He remembered the day well and told it to me exactly like my father had. He, like my father, thought I had forgotten it, so he never brought up the subject. As I hung up the phone, I felt quite ill. I remembered, now, Carl Malone saying something while we were on the cliff about how I wasn’t getting away again. He’d said it to Naomi, too. I just never understood until now.

Waiting for twenty-six years to punish someone the way he wanted to punish me added “pathological narcissism” to the top character traits of Carl Malone. Talk about not taking rejection well. All of this was way too much for me to handle, and I felt myself starting to sweat, as if I was running a fever. I was still by the phone.

“Honey, you should sit down. You don’t look very well. Actually, you’re green,” my father said.

Feeling my lips tingling and fogginess enter my head, I knew what was about to happen. Apparently, Michael did too, because he jumped out of his chair and caught me before I went completely down on my face.

I didn’t go out totally, but I wasn’t able to sit up, even after a couple of minutes. My dad got a cold washcloth to put over my face and forehead. When I felt able to get up, I crawled over to the couch and pulled myself up on it so I could lie down in comfort.

“What happened? Are you sick?” my dad asked, clearly concerned.

“No. I don’t think so. I’ll be fine. It’s just after talking to Tony I started feeling a little dizzy.”

I’m sure the wooziness came from the fact I was realizing that a child murderer tried to make me one of his victims when I was little and had been watching me for most of my life. It was a hard pill to swallow.

I looked at the photograph again. It was like looking at a picture of all the other little girls, the ones who had died. I felt a chill run through my entire body while I stared at my own face. It was a photograph I would never look at again, ever. I put it back in its envelope and handed it to Michael.

“Get this out of here, please. I don’t ever want to see it again.”

Michael nodded. “You okay?”

“I will be,” I said, then added, “someday.”

He went out to the car, giving my dad and me the chance to be alone and talk.

When he was satisfied I could hold up my own head and that I would be able to process what almost happened to me so many years ago, my dad brought up the subject of Michael and of my marriage. I came clean and told him everything, making an honest effort to not place all of the blame on Eric.

“Maybe it was my fault, Dad. I had feelings for another man. How is a husband supposed to deal with that? I mean, I tried to deny that I cared for Michael, but the feelings were there, and Eric saw it. He certainly didn’t deal with it in the best way since he got Jordan pregnant, but really we’re both at fault.”

My father has always been close to Eric and treated him like a son. I told him that didn’t need to change. Eric would always be the father of his grandchildren and a loving parent to the girls. No matter what else might come between us, that is one area Eric and I will always agree on.

“Are you in love with him?” My dad nodded toward the driveway where Michael was.

“More than I could ever explain, Dad. It’s something I’ve never been able to put my finger on, but it’s there. It was different with Eric. I mean, this may sound silly, but with Michael I get butterflies in my stomach. And he knows and accepts me no matter what.” I giggled like a schoolgirl.

“I understand completely.” He smiled.

Dad came over and enfolded me in his arms, giving me a kiss on the forehead.

We walked outside so I could say good-bye to Michael. He still had his hotel room, but would be leaving soon. His transfer to the Cleveland office hadn’t come in yet, so he would have to go back to Virginia. We didn’t know how much longer it would be until we were together again. It was something I didn’t care to think about right then. Nor did he. I kissed his cheek in front of my dad and watched them pull out of my driveway and head down the road.