Authors: Deborah Halber
A few years earlier Ellen had been at her computer, the predecessor of the one with the balky monitor, perusing the Doe Network. She spotted a photo of a bust. At the time, she didn't know that forensic artist Frank Bender was legendary for his uncanny representations of the dead based on nothing more than a skull. This one, created from
a skull found at a Missouri truck stop
embedded in a bucket of concrete, depicted the head and shoulders of a kindly-looking middle-aged gentleman. It was so lifelike it could have been done from a living model. Ellen had sat back in her chair, absentmindedly stroking one of the cats.
She knew the case wouldn't appeal to your everyday web sleuth, who tended to scrutinize identifiers such as height, weight, hair color, eye color, tattoos, personal effects, broken bones, and previous surgeries. Without a body, there was no quantifiable description for this victim; almost everything Bender had done was a guess. No self-respecting web sleuth would waste time on just a skull. It was crazy. It was so crazy, such a stupendous long shot, that Ellen was instantly intrigued. She liked the challenging cases. She adopted them like abandoned kittens.
By mid-January 2001, Greg May's son, Don, was worried. The last time Don saw his father had been at his grandfather's funeral in Chicago the previous April. Don lived in California, but father, son, daughter, and ex-wife were in frequent contact. Don and his sister, Shannon, both in their thirties, hadn't heard from their father in more than two weeks. They changed their phone answering machines to say, “Dad, if this is you, leave us a message.” It wasn't unheard-of for Greg May to be temporarily out of touch. He led a nomadic existence, living in forty or fifty different places in his lifetime. It wasn't uncommon for his children to get a message listing yet another new number and address. He often traveled the country seeking out Civil War treasures.
In addition, he'd told friends he was considering moving to Florida. Bellevue had turned down his request to open a tattoo shop; perhaps he was unreachable because he was scouting out other potential locations, or driving south. But Don couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. The last straw came in mid-February. Greg May's phone was disconnected. Don and Shannon May flew from Santa Monica to Iowa to file a missing-person report with the Bellevue police.
Soon after the grisly discovery of the skull in the bucket, Kearney police enlisted cadaver-sniffing dogs to scour the Kearney truck stop. They didn't locate any other body parts. Later, dogs trained to pick up the scent of human cadavers would detect such a scent in an older-model black Volvo, but that car was hundreds of miles away, waiting to be junked; it would be years before it came to anyone's attention.
Kearney police sent the skull to a forensic odontologist and anthropologist, who hoped the face had left an impression in the contours of the concrete. No such luck: the head had been covered with a stocking cap. They were able to determine the skull belonged to a forty- to sixty-year-old man with existing teeth in good condition and extensive dental work.
In his garage turned study in Gulfport, Chip took over pushing the power button on Ellen's recalcitrant computer. None of the web sleuths I'd met had gleaming, state-of-the-art MacBooks. Not the least bit wealthy, the volunteers all owned clunkers that needed to be wrestled into submission. Ellen's screen flickered. She was lucky, not only because her boyfriend supported her addiction, but also because Glass, a cable TV technician, knew his way around electronics. We watched him wedge his stocky frame underneath the desk. Ellen and I looked on the way the driver of a disabled car hovers helplessly while a mechanic pokes around under the hood. We heard muttering, something about “power distribution . . . source code . . . video card.”
“Still won't come up?” Ellen asked after a few minutes.
“Negative,” Chip responded.
“I knew something else was going to go wrong.” Ellen turned to me despairingly. “I wanted your visit to be perfect.”
I've known women like Ellen Leach. They worry. They plan ahead. They try to think of everything. Before I flew to Mississippi, Ellen had kindly helped me book a room in an ancient white-pillared former mansion on an isolated, rural side road just past what appeared to be defunct railroad tracks. At night, the motel-like strip of rooms in the rear of the antebellum-style main building was eerily silent, apparently hosting no other guests except some peacocks and ducks paddling around in a stream opposite my door. Writers need solitude, Ellen said. She didn't seem to know that former New Yorkers sleep better with the wail of sirens outside their windows. I passed a sleepless night thinking about ax murderers.
May moved between two worlds,
a friend told the
Los Angeles Times
.
He had an eagle tattooed on one shoulder and a clipper ship on the other. Although his collection of Civil War rifles, swords, uniforms, muskets, Western movie posters, photographs, and documents was valuable, he wasn't a flashy dresser, given instead to straw cowboy hats, denim jackets, and “gentleman's loafers,” as Shannon put it. The
Times
reported that May strolled Bellevue's Riverview Street with Duke, also known as Moose, who was tattooed from arms to thighs. The two eventually found jobs in a tattoo parlor across the river in Illinois. They would shoot pool at night and swing by the Frontier Cafe for breakfast. Waitresses remembered May as quiet, friendly, but reserved. Duke was the boisterous one, always cracking jokes. They stayed pretty much to themselves.
After Duke's girlfriend, Julie Johnson, came to town and moved in with them, waitresses noticed a change in Duke: he would sit alone in a corner with Johnson, looking somber and quiet.
“My father did not mince words,” Don May told me years later. “He described Julie as a sneaky bitch, and that's a lot coming from a man who did not use profanity.” Don had, as a teenager, met Duke (or Moose) back
in Kenosha and recalled him as a sketchy character who could turn from jovial to sharp-tongued without warning. Don suspected his father felt sorry for Duke. Greg May's son had long known about his father's trusting nature and occasionally misguided generosity.
Although Greg May grew up in Lake Forest, a swanky Chicago suburb, and moved easily among the largely conservative crowd of Civil War buffs who frequented antique shows and museums, his love of tattooing sucked in ex-cons like Duke. Many tattoo artists are secretive about their craft, but May taught Duke about shading and coloring, showed him the machines that drove tiny inked needles like pile drivers deep into the dermis; showed him how to sterilize the needles in an autoclave, how to push the foot pedal with just the right amount of pressure to pierce the skin with even, solid lines of color and no so-called holidays, or gaps, but not so deeply as to cause excessive pain and bleeding. Finally, May would have shown him how to gently dab away drops of blood or plasma and bandage the new, raw tattoo with clean gauze.
Besides the occasional game of pool and their shared love of tattooing, May and Duke sometimes went fishing together. They used a white plastic bucket to carry their bait.
On January sixteenth, five days after Jan left May's house for the last time, one of Greg May's neighbors saw the woman Jan Buman knew as Julie Ann Johnson loading some of May's antiques into a yellow Ford Ryder moving truck. An acquaintance helped Duke carry a large replica of a clipper ship from the house. Into the truck went bayonets, canteens, 140-year-old newspapers, vintage and modern guns, medals, and engravings. Duke told the landlord he and May were breaking their lease and leaving town. He gave away May's furniture to neighbors. Then he and Julie drove off.
Crime in Bellevue, Iowa, in the late 1990s consisted primarily of small-time thefts and traffic violations. With Dan and Shannon May insisting
something bad had happened to their father, the local police chief called in the state Division of Criminal Investigation.
They found no record of a Julie and Doug Johnson, which was how Julie and Duke were known around town. The police had no plates to run on the Ford Ryder truck the neighbors had noticed outside May's house, but they did get a lead on Greg May's missing car. A 1996 red Chevy Blazer with Wisconsin plates had turned up abandoned in a parking lot 145 miles away, in a suburb of Chicago called Aurora, Illinois. Police found May's keys and wallet inside.
They tracked Duke through a part-time job he had held for a time in a Galena, Illinois, tattoo shop and learned his real name was Douglas DeBruin and he was on parole for weapons possession and domestic assault in Wisconsin.
At home in Santa Monica, a sharp-eyed friend of his father's showed Don May a brochure from an auction company in Illinois that specializes in antique firearms and military artifacts. Don was shocked to see more than seventy pieces from his dad's collection, historic items he had known since his childhood, listed for sale. He knew his father would never auction off such cherished artifacts.
The police questioned the auction house and learned a woman identifying herself as Julie Johnson had said her uncle had died, leaving her and her mother an impressive collection of Confederate swords and Civil Warâera uniforms valued at more than seventy thousand dollars. The paperwork putting the items up for sale went to a Mary Klar in Webster, Wisconsin. A little digging unearthed the fact that Mary Klar is the mother of Julie Johnson, whose real name, it turned out, is Julie Miller.
In April 2001, investigators drove seven hours to Wisconsin. They told Klar a man was missing and that her daughter's boyfriend was a person of interest in his disappearance. Julie, Klar told them, was with DeBruin, living in the back of a Ryder truck in a trailer park in Flagstaff, Arizona.
On April 10, 2001, Miller and DeBruin were arrested in Flagstaff. Their truck contained a notebook with an inventory of May's collection, Civil War antiques including a rifle worth ten thousand dollars, a Confederate sword valued at fifteen thousand, and other items the pair claimed Greg May had given them. They had “no idea” where May might
be. Inside the truck investigators also found a green jacket belonging to DeBruin. There was a suspicious-looking stain on the lower part of the right sleeve.
Two days later, Gary Chilcote was in his office at the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph is around four hundred miles southwest of Bellevue, Iowa, but it's only an hour's drive from Kearney, where the head in the bucket showed up at the truck stop. The whole region is Jesse James country.
In an ironic parallel to May's own fate, in 1882 Jesse James, in what turned out to be a serious misjudgment of character, took in two boarders, brothers Robert and Charlie Ford, and concocted a plan with them to rob the Platte City Bank. Set on collecting a five-thousand-dollar bounty on James's head, the brothers shot him to death in his home.
Chilcote, a Wild West buff and a fan of James, was especially proud of the museum's acquisition of the house located a block away where Robert Ford fatally shot James behind the right ear in 1882. Chilcote founded the museum in 1963 and served as its unpaid director. That day in April, he saw that a package had arrived from an establishment called Pack N' More in Glendale, Arizona.
Inside was a yellowed letter, written in a flowing, handsome script and mounted in a wood frame. Chilcote recognized the letter. He'd seen it years earlier, hanging on the wall of his own museum. The owner, a collector from Illinois, had mounted an exhibition of his historic possessions. Written in 1883, the letter is from ex-soldier and alcoholic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, who is credited with creating the myth that Jesse James was a kind of noble Southern Robin Hood.
The letter offered encouragement to Jesse James's older brother, Frank, on the eve of Frank's 1883 trial for murder and robbery. It was a prize worth at least a thousand dollars, one any Civil Warâera historian would be proud to own, and particularly significant to Chilcote because of its local connections. In his day, Edwards had worked at the
St. Joseph Gazette
, the same newspaper where Chilcote had spent forty years as a court reporter,
and the letter was written on stationery of the Pacific House, a rival hotel to the Patee House.
Chilcote reached into the package and pulled out what looked like a photocopy of a handwritten note. “I would like to donate this letter,” the note stated. “I've read about them and now may contribute to their memory.” The note was signed Greg May. Chilcote told me he didn't find this too surprising. Things sometimes just showed up at museums. But who was this Greg May? Curious, Chilcote phoned the Illinois collector, who confirmed that he had sold the letter to a Greg May around eighteen months earlier.
That same day, the James Farm Museum in Kearney received a similar package with the same photocopied note. This time the unexpected gift was a letter to Frank James written in 1885 concerning legal wranglings involving a Minnesota robbery. Museum director Elizabeth Beckett told a reporter from the
Dubuque Telegraph Herald
that although some might consider it odd to receive a valuable historic letter out of the blue, nothing to do with the James brothers surprised her anymore.
The messages within the letters themselves were curious; the one Chilcote received expressed hope that a murderer and robber would beat the charges against him. But the directors didn't seem to read too much into the letters' content. They were simply grateful that generous history buff Greg May thought their museums worthy recipients of these very interesting artifacts.
A crime lab in Des Moines confirmed that the stain on Duke's jacket sleeve was blood. Using samples from Don and Shannon May in a reverse paternity test that links parents and children, the blood was determined with 99 percent certainty to belong to Greg May.
DeBruin was returned to Wisconsin to do time for his former parole violation. Investigators sat down in Arizona with Julie Miller. Chilcote, who
later saw Miller in the courtroom, described her as a typical forty-four-year-old middle-aged person. She looked like a store employee with her hair pulled up on top of her head. She looked, he said, like someone you might meet in a bar.