“Three-oh-five P.M.”
By four-fifteen, he finished the job of cutting through her skull in order to remove her brain.
“I don’t know why I was so extra careful,” he says, about how fastidiously he bared the raw hemispheres. “I didn’t have any reason to think there was anything wrong inside. There was blood on her T-shirt, but not on her face, possibly because she hung in the water long enough to wash it away. She looked perfectly normal, except for the wound and bruising at her throat. But something told me to go slow.”
Before the last piece of skull was removed, he exclaimed into the microphone, for the tape and posterity to hear, “My god! This child is missing part of her brain!”
But how could this be, when her entire skull was intact until he opened it himself?
Hours later, after X rays and scans, and excruciatingly careful dissection, he committed to the record his opinion: “It appears that the brain has been subjected, postmortem, to a procedure which has resulted in the mutilation of the brain and the removal of the deceased’s pineal gland . . .”
His voice on the tape sounds astonished.
Detectives Anschutz and Flanck were still at the marina interviewing their suspect. By the next day, their supervisor, Captain Cynthia Giancola, would requisition a computer search to determine if any similar bizarre and awful amputation had ever been reported in any other known homicide.
Nothing would ever come up in the search.
It appeared to be a unique theft.
“The pineal gland is the most mysterious organ in the human body.”
Chief Medical Examiner Strough found himself explaining to people as diverse as the police, the prosecutors, defense attorneys, the victim’s family, psychologists, jailers, and journalists, and eventually to a jury.
It was mysterious enough, in fact, that he had to refresh his memory by looking up everything he could find out about it. He wanted to be able to speak about it with some expertise, although he is the first to say that expertise is not the word anybody can easily apply to their knowledge of the pineal.
As he explained at the first press conference:
“Its name comes from the Latin for pinecone, because that is what it resembles: a tiny, fleshy pinecone. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. It was in the human pineal gland, he claimed, which was located deep in the folds of the brain, that a dualist world of matter and spirit converged, it was there where the creative impulses of the invisible world of thought and spirit were magically transformed into the visible world of real things. Only humans had souls, Descartes declared, because only humans had pineal glands. He was wrong about that, as about some other things. Vertebrates have pineal glands. But to this day, science does not know a whole lot more about the purpose or function of the pineal than he did. We know it is part of the endocrine system, which also includes the pituitary, the thyroid, and other glands, and which secrete hormones. We know its function has something to do with light, and sleep, and sexual maturation, but as of the turn of the twenty-first century, we still don’t know much else about it.”
When his listeners still looked baffled, he continued:
“Picture a tiny, tiny pinecone. Imagine that this object is grayish in color. Like a pinecone, it is vaguely pointed at one end, larger and rounded at the other, and the whole thing is smaller than your littlest fingernail. Now place this thing in the center of your head, got that? Put it right in the middle of your brain, so to speak, although please understand that the pineal is not actually part of your brain, but rather, a part of your endocrine—your hormonal—system.”
“You mean, like our sweat glands?” he was asked.
“Exactly. And our pituitary gland, and gonads. Endocrine glands secrete hormones, and in the case of the pineal gland, the hormone it secretes is melatonin.”
“The stuff that helps us go to sleep?”
“Yes, although we think it does other things as well. It appears to regulate sexual maturity, for one thing. The pineal gland is larger in a child under the age of six than it is in an adult, and in the small child it secretes more of the hormone melatonin, which seems to have the effect of delaying the onset of sexual maturity. In the rare cases in which a child has a pineal gland that is smaller than normal for his or her age, that child ages faster sexually than their peers. The secretion of the hormone seems to be affected by the seasons, and by the available light. More light, more secretion of melatonin; less light, less melatonin being secreted by the pineal gland.”
“What else does it do, Doc?”
He compressed his lips, and shook his head, as if at an unsolvable riddle. He decided not to confuse them by telling them what was known about the functions of the pineal in lower vertebrates, and to stick to human beings. “I wish we knew. Some scientists think it must be an extremely important organ in the body, because otherwise, why would nature have gone to such trouble to protect it? I mean, think of it, hidden way deep in the brain, behind the hard skull, and the tough, tough, dura membrane, and way on down into the midbrain. It’s really no wonder that Descartes thought it was the seat of the soul. As our heart is in the protected center of our chest, so the pineal gland is in the very most protected center of our heads.”
“How did he do it?” he was asked. “How can you get part of the brain out, without cracking open the skull?”
Dr. Strough hesitated at this point. What he had to say next was pretty awful, even though the victim hadn’t felt it. “I believe he went up through her nose.”
His audience seemed to recoil as one, with some people crying out in disgust and horror.
“He probably used a thin probe of some sort that had a small scoop attached to the end of it.”
“How could anybody ever even think of a thing like that, Doc?”
“Well, it’s actually a very ancient method of removing a brain without disturbing the skull. The ancient Egyptians employed it when embalming their mummies. All you have to do is stick the probe up just hard enough to crack through a little bone at the base of the nose.”
His audience reacted again, drawing back in dismay.
Eventually, in later interviews, he began to use charts, photographs of brain sections, drawings, even X rays, to educate a morbidly curious world about the one tiny organ that had been stolen from the body of a little girl. But at that first conference, convened by the public information officer of the Bahia Beach Police Department, he kept it simple.
“Was she raped?”
“No.”
“Was there any sexual assault on her?”
“I have not found evidence of that.”
“Was there anything else done to her body, besides . . .”
“Besides removing the pineal? I find no evidence of it.”
“How did she die, exactly?”
“Pressure was applied to her carotid artery, hard enough and long enough to kill her. That cuts off blood flow to the brain, you know. It was quick and, I would say to you, relatively painless. The pressure the killer put on her neck might have hurt her a bit, but she would have lost consciousness quickly. And let me be very clear about the fact that the, uh, surgery on her was performed postmortem. She was dead when the probe entered her brain,” he assured them. “She felt none of that.”
“Small comfort,” somebody muttered
And yet, as the medical examiner seemed to sense, it was an important comfort to her family and to everybody else who cringed at the merest idea that Natalie might have felt any of the physical mutilation that was performed on her body. She didn’t. Everybody kept saying that to themselves, she didn’t feel it. It didn’t make her death less awful, but it made the hideousness of it a little easier to bear.
And then somebody asked the obvious question:
“Doc? Why would somebody want to take a pineal gland?”
The medical examiner had to shake his head and shrug, helplessly.
“Who knows wh
y people do such things?”
But the truth was “people” didn’t “do such things.” As the Bahia police search on the Internet would turn up, this was apparently a unique crime. Murderers had been stealing body parts for centuries, but there was not on record any report of anybody ever before taking only the pineal gland. It is the most deeply hidden of any organ in the body, so a person would have to know how to get at it in order to take it.
“Was this, like, a surgery?” the medical examiner was asked. “Like, by a doctor?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want this person operating on me,” he said, grimly. “My guess is that he got what he wanted. I suppose it’s even conceivable that he got it intact. But if he was operating on you, when you woke up from the anesthetic, you’d be dead, or a vegetable.”
“He made a mess of it?”
The doctor merely nodded, thinking that obvious, and not wishing to dwell on it. Privately, he was thinking that if they’d seen what he had seen, they wouldn’t ask questions like that. Did they really think it was possible to do such a thing neatly? “Surgeon do sometimes go in through a patient’s nose for certain procedures,” he explained, “but not without modern equipment to guide their hands where their eyes can’t see.” This had been no modern surgery.
The whole thing made people who heard it feel very nervous. They shuddered at the mere idea of it.
At first, the homicide of the little deaf girl had seemed tragic and horrible, but not unique.
Yes, there was the dramatic manner in which her body was suspended from a bridge, waiting to be discovered as soon as somebody noticed the fishing pole or the tide receded. That was unusual, maybe even unique in the annals of such morbid things, but it certainly wasn’t the first time a killer left a body for easy public discovery. And yes, there was the fact that the little victim was deaf, but children both hearing and nonhearing have been dying at vicious hands, probably since the dawn of time.
And of course there were the coincidences and the speed by which the suspect was eventually located and apprehended. But that does happen sometimes, cops will tell you. (“On a good day,” they may add, with a wry smile.)
In media terms, if not human terms, none of that added up to any more than a brief sensation, since a suspect was arrested so quickly. The crime provided horror for the noon news, and the arrest led the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts. By the next morning, it was already superseded by other “top stories.”
But that lasted only until the results of the autopsy became known.
That’s when the judgment of the suspect turned from “killer” to “monster.”
The Little Mermaid
By Marie Lightfoot
CHAPTER SIX
That was certainly the view of the interrogating cops, and it wasn’t improved when the suspect refused to take a lie detector test. The detectives had to settle for judging the relative truth of his answers themselves.
“Ray, do you know what a pineal gland is?”
He squinted his left eye. “A what?”
“Come on, Ray, a pineal gland. What is it?”
“Never heard of it.” By this time, the suspect had recovered from his initial submissive attitude, and grown increasingly antagonistic. Over time, he would slide into moods and attitudes as different from one another as the various stages of a metamorphosing insect. Sometimes they would have sworn he was mildly retarded, at other times, he sounded intelligent. At first, there was a zombielike acquiescence, then combativeness, which was followed by an expansive attitude that looked suspiciously like enjoyment, and eventually there would come an iron resistance.
Paul Flanck glanced over at Robyn Anschutz, both detectives thinking the same thing: If he didn’t know what a pineal gland was, why would he want one? And why would he go to so much gruesome trouble to get it?
“Did you remove the pineal gland from Natalie McCullen’s body?”
“Fuck no!”
The very speed and vehemence of his answer seemed to imply that his first answer had been a lie. If he didn’t know what the organ was, why was he so quick to deny taking it?
“Did someone else remove the pineal gland from Natalie McCullen’s body?”
“How would I know?”
“Who else would know, but you?”
“Is this, like, multiple choice?”
“Yeah, here’s your choice, Ray: life in prison, or death in the electric chair. That multiple enough for you? It could depend on how well you cooperate with us. Who put a probe into her skull and took out the pineal gland?”
“Gross! Who would do a thing like that?”
“Is that your answer?”
“Are you deaf?”
“You got a thing about deaf people, Ray?”
The suspect cupped a hand to one ear. “What’d you say?”
Paul Flanck experienced such rage at that moment that he had to leave the interrogation room and go stand outside in the hall and take a few deep breaths.
The detectives attempted to ascertain what Ray had done with the pineal he claimed he hadn’t taken. Robyn could hardly believe she was actually sitting in a room listening to somebody ask questions of this nature.
“Did you eat the pineal gland taken from Natalie McCullen’s body?”
“No.” But he licked his lips when he said it.
Robyn thought she had never seen such an obscene gesture.
“Did you store it somewhere?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you throw it away?”
“Waste not, want not.”
Robyn said, “Did you feed the pineal gland to the fish, Ray?”
“Are you sick, or something?”
Their suspect actually looked shocked, Paul thought. Amazing what could shock a killer. He knew murderers who acted offended if anyone used the name of God in vain. Paul knew one killer who stabbed a woman because she said “goddammit” after he specifically told her not to. Bad guys, Paul thought, far from being truly tough, had about the thinnest skin of anybody. Their egos were not strong enough to withstand much beyond their own narrow limits on other people’s behavior. You insulted them to your peril. And you could never predict exactly what would insult a really bad guy, so if you were smart, you avoided them altogether. Natalie McCullen, unfortunately, had been too young to know this, and far too little and vulnerable to be able to avoid a bad guy who really wanted to grab her.
“Did you give it to somebody else?”
“You can’t give what you don’t have.” Ray looked smug.
Out of their suspect’s line of vision, Robyn shook her head at Paul. It wasn’t hard for him to read the expression on her face: This is too weird! He rolled his eyes, in heartfelt agreement with her.
“If you didn’t give it away, did you sell it?”
“How, like in the Yellow Pages?”
When he was taken away, and they were all left in the room, Robyn exclaimed in frustration, “What the hell did he want it for?”
“We’ve forgotten to ask something,” Paul said.
“What?”
He shot his partner a waspish look. “If we knew that, we wouldn’t be forgetting it.”
“He had to do something with it,” Robyn said, stating the obvious.
But by the time of the trial, they still had not discovered what that was. And, although the jury would hear the grisly evidence, they wouldn’t need to know all of his reasons in order to convict Ray of the murder.
If the marina of the Checker Crab Company looked a mess before the police searched it, that was nothing compared to how it appeared after they went in looking for the site at which Ray had performed his “surgery” on the body of the child. From Donor Miller’s ratty desktop to the greasy dark corners of the maintenance sheds, to the interior and deck of every boat that was known to have been docked at the boatyard the night of her murder, it was all gone over with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, but to no avail.
“We left a hel
l of a mess for Donor to clean up,” Paul Flanck says, not even trying to hide how much that pleases him, “but we didn’t find what we were looking for. We thought we had something for a little while, but it was just the table where they cleaned their fish.”
In fact, in spite of their best efforts to locate the place of surgery, they would come up empty-handed even by the time of the trial. The prosecutor, Franklin DeWeese, would be forced to enter the courtroom without any idea where Ray had taken the child’s body between the time he picked her up and killed her, and the time he hung her from the Thirty-second Street bridge. It was frustrating, but, as the prosecutor would aver to the jury in his opening argument, “Let me tell you right off the bat, that we don’t know where Ray Raintree went with Natty’s body between the time he killed her and the time he abandoned her upon that bridge.
“Somewhere between her death and her hanging,” State’s Attorney DeWeese went on to say, “he did something terrible to that poor little body, but even as of this day, we don’t know exactly where that event took place. The defense will try to tell you it matters. They’ll try to tell you that you need to know what he did every minute in order to declare him guilty of these crimes. But I swear to you that’s not true. It doesn’t matter, not according to the law. It doesn’t make any difference to this trial. In order to find him guilty, you don’t have to know anything other than the fact that he killed her. Simple as that. While it matters to all of us in our hearts, it doesn’t matter from a legal standpoint. He kidnapped and killed that child and mutilated her body. Period. End of statement. That’s all you need to know in order to convict him, and to prevent the possibility that this man could ever commit a similar atrocity upon any other innocent child.”
Even though the “surgery” was conducted postmortem, there had to have been a quantity of blood and tissue, but they didn’t find much. There was some on a tarp, and microscopic examination turned up some in the boat, where they also found strands of her hair. They surmised that afterward he covered her body with the tarp in the bottom of the taxi. Eventually, based on the location of blood evidence, it was surmised that he hung her head over the side of the boat to perform his “surgery.” However he did it, he kept most of the blood and tissue from getting on her or the boat, thus hiding the shocking truth inside her skull.