The Skeleton Crew (6 page)

None of them ever saw him again.

Carol and her daughter moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. She remarried and got a job as a paralegal. She had a son with her new husband and stayed in touch with her former in-laws.

By 2003, Carol had been poking around the Internet for a few years. She had learned how to probe its little-known corners to uncover the useful esoterica buried there. Finding bits of information on the Web reminded her of scavenger hunts, Nancy Drew mysteries, and trivia contests. As a child, she'd loved math word problems. The Internet was similarly challenging: you had to sift through the irrelevant dross for clues that led to the solution. Years later, she'd remember the pulp detective magazines stacked on her grandmother's bedside table and wonder if she had inherited a hankering to be a private eye.

Besides, Carol, divorced for a second time, with Ashley approaching college age, thought their daughter deserved to know her father's story. Or at least collect Social Security death benefits. Carol found her way to Missing Persons Cold Case Network, where she saw nothing related to Todd. But she became riveted by photos of another young man, missing for seven years, who'd lived not far from where she and Todd grew up in New Jersey. There was something about his pronounced jaw that reminded Carol of her beloved, developmentally disabled little sister.

In 1975, Sean Lewis Cutler, seven years old,
was living with his divorced mother in an apartment complex in Kentucky. A carbon monoxide leak killed Sean's mother and plunged Sean into a months-long coma. When he awoke, doctors told his father, Lewis, that Sean's brain had been severely damaged. He would be blind and wheelchair-bound for life.

The owner of the apartment building and the contractor who caused the accident settled with Lewis Cutler for $1.6 million. After lawyer's fees, around $800,000 was set aside for Sean's care. Lewis Cutler remarried a few years later. His new wife legally adopted Sean.

In 1992, shortly after Lew gained control of his handicapped son's trust fund, his life started unraveling. He told his wife that he saw no reason
to go on living because planetary forces would destroy the world in May 2000. Calling him deranged and emotionally abusive, she filed for divorce and moved to Florida.

In 1994, Lewis rented a house in Wayne, New Jersey, for himself and Sean, but the next year he told family members that he had signed custody of his disabled son over to a nursing home in Canada.

In July 1996, Lewis Cutler was arrested for drunk driving, drug possession, and providing false information in the form of a driver's license in his son's name. An investment firm wired him the fraction of the trust money that he hadn't frittered away. A week later, Lewis Cutler's rented house burned to the ground.

Arson investigators picking through the rubble found the bodies of Cutler and a man named William Spitzer, a friend of Lewis's. They determined that someone had intentionally ignited a natural gas line in the basement. The windows had been tightly sealed and a battery to a smoke alarm was tucked in Spitzer's pocket.

At first, investigators who found the driver's license in Sean's name believed Sean, too, must have died in the fire. But they found no trace of him.

When Carol spotted Sean's photo in MPCCN, she read that Sean's family believed he was in a nursing home in Canada. If that was the case, Carol knew that there would be a paper trail.
Somebody will find that boy,
she thought, and moved on to the next web page.

That same day, Carol happened upon an online notice posted by the Vermont State Police that included an artist's rendering of a young man who had a strong jaw and a shock of dark hair. She scanned the details: the remains had been discovered in 1997 in a remote area of southern Vermont when a Labrador retriever had trotted home one day with its teeth clamped around a human skull. A day or so later, the dog brought back a lower jaw, then a femur. The police outfitted the dog with a radio collar, but no more bones turned up. Based on certain characteristics of the thighbone, the medical examiner thought the deceased might have been disabled.

Carol went back to the missing-person listing for Sean Cutler. The skull
and bones were discovered less than a year after the suspicious fire. The clay model based on the remains showed a dark-haired young man with a prominent brow, an unnaturally jutting chin, slightly parted lips. “There were so many things in common: the geographical similarities, the look, the disability,” Carol recalled later. “I looked at it, and I knew.”

A man named Patrick Harkness, Sean's cousin, had posted an Internet plea for help finding Sean. Carol e-mailed Harkness.

Carol learned from Harkness that Lewis and Sean Cutler had lived for a time in upstate New York in the early 1990s, not far from rural, woodsy Readsboro, Vermont. Harkness told her about the carbon monoxide poisoning that disabled Sean, the settlement, and Lewis Cutler's cutting off all ties with the family in 1995.

Exactly how and when Sean Cutler died is still a mystery. To Harkness and others who reconstructed the last few years of Lewis Cutler's life, a picture emerged of a troubled man who, while taking good care of his son, was also gambling away his trust fund in the stock market. Lewis lost more than a hundred thousand dollars in 1995 alone. Police speculated that Lewis, desperate and running out of money, killed his son, buried his body in the Vermont woods, and then set fire to the New Jersey house in an attempt to cover his tracks before he fled the country. Spitzer's brother told police a pilot was scheduled to pick up Lewis Cutler a day after the fire and fly him to the Caribbean. But something clearly went terribly wrong for the two men inside the burning house.

Six months after Carol's tip to the Vermont State Police led to Sean's identification, Carol attended Sean's memorial ceremony in upstate New York. A woman who identified herself as one of Sean's aunts approached her. “What you did made it possible for all of us to be here today,” she told Carol.

Harkness, who during his search for his cousin had become a follower of the Doe Network, persuaded Carol to join the group. She perused it daily, over time joining its administrative board and helping vet other members' matches.

Carol still hadn't accomplished what she had set out to do: find her
ex-husband.

In 2008, four years after Sean Cutler's memorial service, Todd Smith's sister phoned Carol. “Are you sitting down?” she asked her former sister-in-law.

“He drowned,” she told Carol.
“They found him in the ocean at Daytona Beach,
and he had flippers and a flashlight.”

Carol felt her heart in her throat. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

On the Doe Network, she had come across a listing for a young man wearing flippers whom she had once considered a match for Todd. But too much didn't line up. For one thing, his age was cited as somewhere between eleven and twenty; Todd Smith was twenty-five. The dead man's eye color was gray; Todd's was bright blue. But the real deal-breaker, as far as Carol was concerned, was that the dead man had been found in the water. Todd wasn't keen on the beach and never swam in the ocean, even on summer family trips to Martha's Vineyard. “If this Doe was found on a golf course with a nine iron, I would have jumped on it, but the flippers and the flashlight? It made no sense,” Carol said later.

On May 18, 1989, on the 300 block of South Ocean Beach in Daytona Beach the day after Todd left New Jersey, witnesses reported a man struggling in the water. Rescuers were unable to locate him, even with the use of a helicopter. His body washed ashore early the next morning.

Nineteen years later, scrolling through the Doe Network's listings for missing men, a forensic technician in Volusia County, Florida, working her way through the county's cold cases spotted a report for a tall man, over six feet, with curly hair. She scanned a poster showing Todd Smith in a tux at his wedding; a second photo of him with a trim little mustache; a third in which he was clean-shaven in a plaid shirt and oversized pink-tinted sunglasses. She looked at all four photos—the postmortem photo of a drowning victim who had never been identified, the ones online, the dates, and the description: white male, eleven to twenty years old, over six feet, 175 pounds. Greenish/gray eyes, curly brown/blond hair. White-and-black patterned swim trunks; on his left wrist was a diver's flashlight on a strap; swimming flippers were on his feet. Mustache; circumcised; a two-inch
surgical scar on the left lateral chest.

Todd's missing-person report listed him as six-three, 160 pounds, dark blond curly hair, blue eyes, with a small scar on his neck. The age, eye color, and scars didn't jibe, but still she said to herself,
That's my John Doe.

She sent New Jersey police a fingerprint from the body. The prints pulled off Smith's car were confusing; the cops were never certain which were his. But the drowning victim's dental records matched Todd Smith's.

For days, Carol and Todd's family walked around asking one another: “Flippers and a flashlight? What was he doing?”

Looking for a document among Todd's things soon afterward, Carol found snapshots of her ex perched on a motorcycle in a parking lot surrounded by palm trees. Then she remembered that after they separated, Todd had gone to Aruba on one of his jaunts. In the next photo, date-marked July 1988, less than a year before he went missing, he was pictured underwater in full snorkeling gear.

When Todd left his car behind, Carol guessed he was embarking on one of his solo trips, this time to Daytona Beach, where he'd decided to snorkel, apparently alone and—given the fact that he had a flashlight—at night. The Atlantic was not the serene Caribbean, and Todd, an inexperienced ocean swimmer, was likely no match for the unforgiving waves and riptides.

After Todd's remains were positively identified, his sister and daughter flew to Florida to retrieve them. In New Jersey, they collected the suitcase containing his cremated remains from the baggage carousel. His sister put the suitcase down, fell to her knees, and said, “Todd, you're home.”

When, as a little girl, Ashley had asked about her father, Carol told her that her father loved her and wished he could be with her. She was relieved when Ashley, who grew up tall, athletic, and blond like Todd, seemed to accept her vague reassurances. When she learned Todd's fate, Carol was relieved that he hadn't abandoned his child or his family after all, and that nobody had hurt him. But as Carol and I sat in her living room among papers and photos that pieced together strange truths about lives that would never have intersected if it weren't for MPCCN and the Doe Network, Carol told me a story that indicated that she hadn't really been aware of what was going through Ashley's head.

Ashley once heard Carol remark about a friend, “It's like she fell off the
face of the earth.” Eight-year-old Ashley pictured the ground opening up in a yawning abyss. That, she thought with satisfaction, finally explained what had happened to her dad: Todd was walking along, minding his own business, when he took one false step and
whoosh
, he was gone.

In the decade after the first newsgroups appeared, Yahoo! groups such as Troy More's ColdCases logged tens of thousands of posts and signed on thousands of members seeking to play armchair detective with the burgeoning amount of information becoming available online. The web forum became their sitting room; its members played Watson to incarnations of Holmes. The new breed of sleuths spent hours a week, sometimes hours a day, surfing sites, typing “unidentified remains” and “missing persons” into search engines. Some forums were logging thousands of hits while Google and Wikipedia were in their infancy and YouTube didn't even exist.

In the 1940s,
psychologist Harry F. Harlow discovered that monkeys
would solve simple mechanical puzzles even if offered no rewards at all. They seemed to do it for the sheer fun of it, and Harlow speculated that human motivation also operated by what he called intrinsic drive. The clues people found on the fledgling Internet provided them with opportunities to use their powers of deduction in a public forum. Like Holmes, armchair detectives appreciate an admiring audience. Real-life mysteries are rarely clear-cut or resolved as neatly as fictional ones. But, like the monkeys' puzzles, they fascinate, maybe because of their ambiguity and complexity. Some amateur sleuths say working on a challenging case is like exercising a strong muscle. A twenty-three-year-old musician, posting on a blog, noted that he once thought he did puzzles because of the euphoria he experienced when he solved them, but then realized the process was just as satisfying as the solution.

Through a site that included official photographs, maps, forensic evidence, and copies of original missing-person reports, ColdCases users in the early part of the millennium second-guessed the police investigation into the Green River serial killer and other famous cases. Not only did the site provide an insider's perspective into how cases should be investigated, visitors could see where police completely dropped the ball.

The late James Q. Wilson, author and public policy expert, believed that cold cases are especially appealing precisely because early efforts to solve them have failed, intensifying the challenge. It's exactly the kind of game—trying to outsmart a clever murderer—Agatha Christie set up so irresistibly in tale after tale.

For generations weaned on Christie, John Grisham, Sue Grafton, and dozens of others, this was heady stuff. If Betty Brown or Troy More or Todd Matthews—or any of the other accomplished web sleuths I'd meet, such as determined Ellen Leach, eagle-eyed Daphne Owings, and sharp-thinking Bobby Lingoes—managed to match a missing person with unidentified remains, there was glory in accomplishing what no one else had managed to do. There was the exhilaration of outsmarting the police, who may have been uncooperative and dismissive, if not downright rude, when the web sleuth called with a question about that very case. There was fifteen minutes of fame if the local paper or
48 Hours
came knocking.