By Reason of Insanity (34 page)

SENATOR STONER was angry. He took time out from his lecture tour to publicly ridicule the police theory that Charles Manson’s followers were behind the horrible murders. It was Vincent Mungo and no one else, as any fool could see. Stoner was no fool. He saw that he had cast his lot with Mungo the maniac, and he wasn’t about to cast off in another direction now.

ON THURSDAY Sheriff Oates called on Lieutenant Spanner for a friendly chat. They talked mostly about their problem. Spanner reminded the sheriff that in his case it was purely academic since he no longer had any responsibility in the matter. Oates nodded glumly; he was still officially involved.

“But if he keeps moving on,” said the sheriff, brightening, “my troubles’ll be over.”

“Still think it’s our friend?”

“What do you think, John?”

The lieutenant was annoyed for a moment but shrugged it off and smiled. “It’s the Willows killer you’re looking for. He did them all.”

“Mungo!”

The word was spat out, like a curse.

Spanner said nothing. He had once mentioned his idea of what happened at Willows on that rainy July night. He didn’t intend to be laughed at again.

“Why he’d cut them like that is beyond me. What’s he get out of it?”

“He hates women.”

“The sap at Willows was a man.” Oates grumped in his throat. “Maybe when he kills men he destroys the face and with women it’s the body.” Grumped again. “Can’t trust these nuts to do anything logical.”

Spanner sat there stunned. He had never thought of that. Of course! The male face and the female body. The power that could hurt him and the temptation that could defeat him.

After Oates left, Spanner sat quietly in his office and thought back to his first meeting with Dr. Baylor the morning of the murder and escape. What was it Baylor had said? For many patients the face was the focal point of all their rage. It was the face that lied to them and laughed at them. And at a place like Willows all the faces were—male.

Jesus, Spanner kept repeating to himself. Maybe he really was getting too old for the job.

ON THE day after Sheriff Oates’ visit to Hillside, Bishop was winding up a week in El Paso. He liked the town, liked its warmth and color, its open spaces, its two cultures. He promised to return, knowing he would never be able to keep the promise. A wanderer, he had no home and no roots. All he had was his work, and for that he had to be always on the move.

In quiet moments he found himself asking why he was chosen for such an impossibly lonely life, But he knew the answer. He was his father’s son, the only son of his father, Caryl Chessman, who commanded him, and so he had to go about his father’s business. In secret and in silence. The enemy was everywhere and he was so small and helpless.

Perhaps if his mother were alive. But she deserted him, left him alone. His father too. They both left him alone. He needed them and they had left him all alone.

He loved his mother dearly. She was dead.

Sometimes he would look at the picture of his mother that he carried in his new wallet. She was a very tall, thin woman with brown hair and perfectly even teeth. She wore a severe dress that made her seem matronly. Occasionally he showed the picture to others, a girl perhaps or someone in a bar. He was very proud of her, she looked just like a mother should look.

He was proud of his father too, and wanted everyone to know about him. And about his son. But he had to be careful.

Before leaving Willows he had removed the two pictures of himself from his file in the administration building. He was friends with the clerk and often brought him pieces of fruit. One day the clerk went to the men’s room; it took him only a minute to find the folder. Afterward he destroyed the two photographs, burned them,

He was not only unknown and unsuspected but unphotographed, at least as he really looked. The man with no face.

And no fingerprints.

He was the perfect killing machine.

Now on his last day in El Paso, Bishop wrote another letter, this one to Senator Stoner, whom he had read about and seen on television. Stoner was an authority figure. He was stern and strong, and he had great power. He could make people do things. He could commnand and people would obey.

The letter began: “My Master …”

ON THAT same day another note arrived at the
Newstime
building, postmarked Lordsburg, New Mexico, This time the message was a bit more explicit. Derek Lavery read it over again: More to come.

He stared at the signature.

Son of Man.

At his side Adam Kenton frowned. Something was shadowed in the back of his mind, something having to do with the signature, but he couldn’t pull it out. Not at the moment anyway.

Obviously Manson and Son of Man meant the same thing.

But what?

BY EARLY afternoon the airwaves crackled with the news of another letter that seemed to indicate Manson followers were involved in the sensational murders of young women. Everyone remembered Manson and now here was the Son of Man, whoever he was, carrying on the slaughter even more fearfully than his predecessor or leader.

IT HIT him suddenly, without warning, later in the day.

“My God!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

Of course. That was it!

Manson. Son of Man.

Chessman.

Son of Chessman.

Now he knew who the killer was and why he was sending the letters to the magazine.

He even knew why the women were being slaughtered.

Kenton speared the phone to ring upstairs.

WITH THE sudden flurry of interest in Charles Manson and his followers since receipt of the first note at the beginning of the week, news of Vincent Mungo was temporarily shunted aside as the media capitalized on the notoriety of the Manson name.

It was only momentary of course, for Mungo was soon back in the headlines as the true significance of the notes became horrifyingly evident.

“LET ME get this straight. You say he sent the notes here because of the
Chessman
story?”

“Of course,” said Kenton. “Caryl Chessman’s the key to the whole thing.”

“Why Chessman, for chrissake? What’s he got to do with it?”

“Don’t you get it? Mungo believes Chessman is his father. Think of the signatures. Man-son. Son of Man. Son of
Chess
-man.” Kenton gulped air. “When Mungo read the Chessman story he sent us a letter saying he was Chessman’s son. We thought it was just another crank.” He looked at Ding ruefully. “What else could we think?” Back to Lavery. “But now look at the letter. It says women are bad, not capital punishment. Women! And it says Chessman knew that.”

Lavery studied the sheet of paper in his hand. He wished he had seen it earlier. Maybe he would’ve caught the link right away.

“You think it’s Mungo?”

“He killed up at Willows when he escaped. Then the real killing started.” Kenton shook his head. “It’s Mungo all right. You can bet on it.”

“So what’ve we got?”

“We got one helluva story is what we got. Mungo is Chessman’s son somehow. Or at least he thinks he is. He kills women because they’re bad, or at least he thinks they are.”

Lavery glanced again at the letter. “Why’d he address it
From Hell
, on the top like that? What’s it mean?”

“Maybe his life
was
hell being Chessman’s kid,” Ding blurted out.

“He
ain’t
Chessman’s kid.”

“He
thinks
he is. That’s the same thing.”

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

Then: “Maybe he
is
Caryl Chessman’s son.” It was Kenton.

Lavery eyed him as though he were nuts.

“What do we really know about Mungo? Mother dead, father dead. In and out of hospitals a dozen times. A grandmother and some aunts in Stockton—all women. But when we did the story we found out he was born right here in L.A. And his parents didn’t marry until a year later. Why?”

“You might have something.” Ding’s instincts were working now. “Nobody ever checked that angle. Who knows what happened twentyfive years ago? Maybe—”

He stopped.

Kenton’s mouth was open, as if he were seeing a ghost.

“What is it?”

“You said twentyfive years ago.”

“What about it?”

The voice was a whisper, as though coming from the grave. “Twentyfive years ago in L.A. Caryl Chessman was—”

“Jesus Christ!”

The three men looked at one another in silence. If they lived to be a hundred, none of them would forget the electricity of this moment.

“Jesus Christ,” Lavery repeated, wetting his lips.

BISHOP AWOKE in darkness. Oftentimes late at night he would wake up in a cold sweat, his eyes closed, seeing the woman standing over the frightened boy. In her hand the great whip rose and fell endlessly, cutting deeper into the boy’s frail body. Now it told him that his time was at hand. He had spent a pleasant week scouting the city, seeing what he had to see. Now the time had come to do what he had to do.

He dressed in the dark, slowly. Only the bathroom light was clicked on, to check the money’s hiding place once more, His jacket went on last, hiding the long knife. Outside, his shadow loomed large across the desolate land under the late night sky.

When he finally returned, two more women had been added to his growing list of victims. One of them was a Mexican national from nearby Juarez. She was well known to border guards. The other was a young El Paso woman he had found someplace along Alameda. She was alone and he was alone and there was talk of an exchange. Now she would be alone forever.

The next day, a Saturday, he left for San Antonio on the early bus, money and flight bag in hand.

It was September 15, 1973.

He left behind two female bodies that were literally shredded. Only the faces and feet were untouched. In each mouth was stuffed a page of the magazine story on Caryl Chessman.

The bodies were discovered late Saturday night. Local police had never seen anything like it. They first suspected the carnage was the work of some wild beast. When it was finally tied to the Mungo killings, they felt that a monster had been in their midst.

In subsequent years the crime became known in Texas police annals as the El Paso Massacre, and local people still talk in whispered words of that fearful mid-September eve.

ON THAT same Saturday that saw Bishop sped to San Antonio, police were again at the home of Vincent Mungo’s maternal grandmother in Stockton, California. The previous evening, after hearing new evidence presented by the Los Angeles bureau chief of
Newstime
, sheriffs deputies once more interviewed the relatives. They were told that Mungo had been born in Los Angeles because his mother lived there at the time. For how long? About two years.

During that time she met and eventually married the boy’s father. They hadn’t married right away because he, the father, insisted on first saving enough money. Even though the woman was pregnant? Yes. They finally married about a year after the birth. When did they first meet? About a year before the birth. When she first arrived there? Yes. So they knew each other for two years before they married, is that right? Yes. And a year before Mungo was born? Yes.

“Let’s see, that would make it mid-1947.”

“Vincent was born in October 1948, so that would be about right.”

“She knew the father since 1947 but didn’t marry him until 1949… ?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I told you, he wanted to save enough money.”

“For what?”

“For them to get married.”

Between Friday night and Saturday noon police checked with the father’s close relatives in the East. Apparently he hadn’t gone to California until April of 1949; before that he had never been west of Chicago. Soon after his arrival in Los Angeles he met and married Mungo’s mother, in August of that year. She told him she was widowed, her husband killed in the war.

Now police were back in the house, and leading them was Sheriff James T. Oates. He had once again been put in charge of the investigation. Since Vincent Mungo had left the state and therefore the jurisdiction of California, the special task force had been disbanded by the governor’s office, except for liaison work with the other states.

Oates was in no mood for gray-haired old ladies. Or for lies. He told the women point-blank that they had been lying, and he demanded the truth. Mungo’s mother had met her husband in 1949 and married him some months later, when the boy was already almost a year old. Since he couldn’t have been the father, who was?

The grandmother began to cry.

“Who was the father?”

Her cries became louder.

Oates was exasperated.

“Who was the father?” he shouted over her sobs.

One of the aunts shifted her eyes away. “We never knew,” she said softly.

The grandmother looked at her helplessly.

“Vincent’s mother was attacked about six months after she went to live in Los Angeles. In January 1948. She became pregnant. The baby was born in October.”

“Did they catch the man?”

“No.”

“Ever find out who he was?”

“No.”

Oates thought fast. The dates matched. Chessman was free for most of January 1948 and doing his rapes and robberies. He wasn’t caught until the last week.

“Was Mungo ever told about it?”

The aunt looked at him as though he were crazy. “Of course not.”

“Could he have found out, maybe from a nosy neighbor?”

“Nobody knew but the three of us. Naturally we never told anyone.”

“How about the mother?”

“She’d be the last to ever say anything.”

“She told no one?”

“No one.”

“Not even her husband?”

The aunt turned ashen, she found it hard to speak.

Oates pounced. “She told him.”

The grandmother shrieked in sorrow.

Her daughter nodded. “Years later,” she whispered. “She became angry at him one night and told him she’d never been married.”

“Why didn’t she tell him the truth right away?”

“She was ashamed.” The aunt smiled grimly. “You know how men look at a thing like that. They always think a raped woman asked for it.”