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“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”

Before I’d left the Stiles’s trailer, Tyrill, mindful of the rash of vehicular robberies and murders in Florida, had advised, “Watch yourself. If someone bumps you, you keep going.”

So I was watching myself—mindful of any suspicious-looking cars on the road that might bump me—and concentrating on keeping alive. And that is why I happened to miss seeing the girl who had been dumped by the side of the road.

I wasn’t the only one who kept on going, whether out of fear or just a mistaken assumption that the crumpled remains of what had once been a human being was instead a discarded sack of clothes. It took awhile for someone to stop and investigate, because unusual things were the norm in Gibsonton, Florida.

Gibsonton was carny town USA, the place where the men and women who played carnivals and circuses during the summer came to winter, not just the “normal” ones who worked the Philly cheese steak concessions, the ball tosses, and the rides, but the freaks that made the carnival a unique art form.

Gibsonton could pass for freak-town USA. The post office had mailboxes at knee level for midgets and dwarfs. That kid walking on his flippers down the street was Grady Stiles III, whose father was the most famous freak of all, Lobster Boy. Unfortunately, for Lobster Boy his wife had arranged his murder and he was now six feet under. But his old buddy Midget Man, who married his wife, was still around. I’d just interviewed him in the trailer he shared with Grady III, Grady’s sister Cathy, and Tyrill, Cathy’s husband.

Maybe that night the Fat Man, the Bearded Lady, and the World’s Only Living Half Lady passed by the girl on the side of the road and, like me, didn’t see her, or maybe they just kept going. It wasn’t until 10:40 P.M. that the headlights of the car driven by Michelle Akers picked out the girl’s body by the side of the road. Akers stopped and looked down at the girl, who appeared to be dead. Quickly, she looked around. There were no other persons or vehicles near the body. She sped toward her house and called the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

By that time, I was back in my hotel, hard at work on the book Lobster Boy. As for the cops, their work had just begun.

When Detective Larry Lingo got to the scene, he saw a car in the road flashing its high beams on and off. He pulled his 1985 Ford LTD alongside it.

Lingo pulled off to the shoulder and before he’d even parked, he popped the trunk. With a grace that belied his tall, heavily muscled frame, Larry Lingo eased himself out of the car. His white hair and mustache made him look a little older than his fifty-two years.

Reaching into the trunk, he came out with a carton of plastic gloves. He put one set on, then reached back in and came up with a flashlight. Slowly, with the beam extended out before him, he approached the body.

Under the pale yellow light, her skin was a dead white except for the blood, dark brown, dried and crusted on her face. She lay on her back, her head pointing east, her arms stiff and up in the air as if in prayer. She wore a blue jacket, pink shirt, and white shorts with a black belt, blue socks, and white shoes.

Lingo worked the crime scene like his boss Corporal “Pops” Baker had taught him. He had forensics photograph and document the scene. He looked for foot or tire prints near the body—found none—and did a cursory examination of the victim.

She was maybe midtwenties to thirty, and it looked like she’d been beaten up. Noting a lack of evidence of struggle at the scene, Lingo surmised that she had been killed someplace else and dumped there. He looked around.

There was a lake 200 yards distant; its water calm, dead silent. There were trailers nearby, where some of the carnies lived. Nothing but brush where she had been dumped. It was a lonely place to end a life.

At 9:45 A.M., Lingo, wearing his normal work clothes—a JC Penney sport jacket, shirt, and tie, as opposed to the more formal suits he wore on court days—arrived to watch the autopsy. At the morgue, Dr. Robert Pfalzgraf had the body stripped and each item of clothing placed in plastic bags for further analysis. If they got lucky, maybe a few microscopic strands of the killer’s hair had found its way onto the clothing, which they could later match up. Or maybe something else of value would show up.

Once naked, the body was photographed from all angles. A rape kit was prepared, standard procedure in female body “dump” cases, with swabs from the woman’s vagina, pubic hair combings, and fingernail scrapings sent to the police lab for analysis.

Pfalzgraf’s physical examination disclosed that the victim, while having been beaten around the head, which accounted for the dried blood on her face, had noticeable ligature marks around her neck, about a half inch in width. In layman’s parlance, she had been strangled to death.

Using the classic autopsy “Y” incision, Pfalzgraf explored the body cavity and found no abnormalities of the victim’s organs. With nothing else to the contrary, Pfalzgraf concluded someone, probably a man, had been strong enough to wrap something around her throat, possibly a belt, and. squeeze hard enough to break her windpipe, depriving her brain of oxygen and causing her death.

Lingo had a police technician take her prints for identification. The prints were run through various law enforcement databases. They came up with nothing.

It was the kind of case every cop hates: no name to the victim and no suspects. Twelve hours after discovery of the body, the case had made the news. When Lingo got back to his office, Pops Baker told him that Susan Colwell had called. She’d seen the report on television and feared the victim was Roslin Kruse, her niece.

Immediately Lingo obtained a copy of Kruse’s driver’s license from the Florida DMV. Looking at Kruse’s picture on her driver’s license, Lingo thought it was the same person, but couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile, Pops Baker called Colwell back.

“Tillie Campbell, who’s another aunt, she’ll be calling you to help with the identification,” said Colwell. But Baker didn’t wait and called Tillie Campbell. She came down to homicide headquarters immediately. Lingo and Baker interviewed her briefly, then removed a Polaroid of Kruse that a police photographer had taken after her death.

But she needed to make sure. They all drove down to the morgue, where Campbell viewed Roslin’s body and made a positive ID.

It turned out that the twenty-three-year-old Kruse lived off Hillsborough Avenue, in an area of Tampa loaded with hookers. Canvassing the area, Lingo came up with hookers who knew the girl. One in particular, Vivian Dumars, who claimed to have been off the street for a year, had been her friend.

“I first saw Lynn a year ago in the parking lot over there,” said Dumars, pointing across the street at the Kash and Karry convenience store parking lot located on Fiftieth Street. “Lynn would pick up dates in the parking lot, leave to do a trick, and come back to the lot afterward.”

“Crack. She was on crack, and she worked four to five days straight to pay for the stuff. But, Lynn was not street-smart. And was always [getting] beat money by her dates and in the holes where she would buy her drugs, and by the other girls.”

“Oh, yeah. She went down there a lot when the ‘heat’ [police] were in the area.”

“Lynn would do a trick, come back and get drugs off some black guys on Forty-eighth Street, then go pick up another john.”

“What wouldn’t she do? Was there any type of guy she would refuse?” Lingo asked.

That was important. Maybe she refused a guy who got angry. Or maybe a john asked her to do something, she said no, and he killed her.

That could narrow it down, too, if she refused a guy who wanted oral sex, for example.

“It was after dark, at Starvin Marvin’s over at Fiftieth Street and Columbus.”

“See, when I heard about a body being found on Tuesday morning, I started to call, but I … couldn’t.”

She was worried it might be Roslin. Unfortunately, it was. A theory of the crime began to form in Lingo’s mind.

Lingo surmised that Kruse might have been picked up in the Kash and Karry parking lot. Knowing that there were some undercover cops from vice working the streets—every hooker on the avenue would have been wary of them—she would have gone with the john to have sex in Gibsonton. Then, after a money dispute, the john killed her and dumped her.

It could also have been more matter-of-fact, with the killing taking place in a john’s apartment. Under cover of darkness, the killer could have transported the body out to Gibsonton.

Hell, she could have been going down on a guy in a parking lot around the corner. He didn’t like the way she gave head, strangled her, took her out to Gibsonton, and dumped her.

Sam DelGaudio had seen the news reports of Kruse’s homicide and thought the description of the victim sounded familiar. After checking with his partner Frank Delamater, DelGaudio realized they knew her.

It seemed that on the day of the murder, in the early afternoon, Detectives DelGaudio and Delamater, of the vice squad, were conducting an undercover investigation of downtown Tampa’s prostitution. They saw a white hooker pick up a john and then go with him to his apartment. They followed.

They set up surveillance at the john’s apartment for ten minutes. Lacking probable cause, they opted not to knock and see what was going on behind closed doors. The cops split, leaving the two inside to their own devices.

Lingo drove out to the apartment house. He contacted the manager of the complex and found out that the residents of number 18 were Pat and Linda Ryan.

Under the blazing hot Tampa sun, Lingo walked up the stairs to the apartment and out onto the catwalk. He reached under his coat and felt briefly for the reassuring butt of his revolver, eased it up and down in the holster a few times to make sure there were no snags if he needed it, then took his hand out and knocked at the door.

Flashing the tin, Lingo told Ryan why he was there. Pat Ryan let him in and told the following story:

On Monday, November 1, he left his house at about 8 A.M. He took his wife to work and then dropped his kids at their school. He got back to his house around 8:30, and at 11 A.M., he met his wife for lunch. After that, he went home again and stayed there until he picked her up at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Lingo knew he was lying. The two under-covers had seen him come into his house with Kruse early Monday afternoon.

“Why don’t we continue talking downtown,” Lingo said. “There are a few inconsistencies in your story we need to clarify.”

The average citizen doesn’t know it, but when a cop “invites” you downtown for questioning, it really is an invitation. Unless a cop has a warrant for your arrest, you can tell him to go to hell. But Ryan readily agreed.

When they got there, Lingo placed him in a green interrogation room. Ryan, was smiling and cooperative.

“Okay, look, you were followed to your house on Monday by two undercover cops,” Lingo advised.

“They saw you with the girl, so tell us what you know. Now, before things get worse.”

That confirmed the two vice detectives’ observations. So far, the suspect—and that’s exactly what Ryan now was, a suspect in a homicide—was telling the truth.

“… at about one o’clock on Monday. I took her directly to my apartment. She kept demanding that I take her out to Hillsborough Avenue to buy her some crack.”

“I told her no, that I wanted to go home first, and then I’d take her back to Hillsborough.”

“When we got to my apartment, we went inside. She gave me head and I paid her twenty-five bucks. Then I took her back out to my car and rode back with her to Hillsborough Avenue, where I pulled off to the right and stopped. She got out and I made a U-turn and went back to my apartment.”

Though his story was suspicious, Lingo had to let him go. The cop went back out to Hillsborough to see if any of the hookers knew the dead woman.

“I last saw Roslin on Saturday,” said Luann Potash, another hooker friend of Kruse’s that Lingo managed to locate. “She stayed with me from time to time. See, Lynn was very timid and was easily intimidated by the other ladies working the street.”

Cowan was a thin white girl who also worked the avenue and had a crack problem. But they had been roommates awhile back. Now, Lynn had a guy she was staying with. She directed Lingo to the residence, just a few blocks away.

“Lynn was staying over there,” she said, pointing at a house. “With a guy named Sammy.”

Potash got out and walked back to her post, while Lingo went over to check out the residence. It was just a dilapidated cottage. The name on the door was “Samuel Thompkins.”

Lingo looked at his watch. It was 5:45 P.M. He knocked on the door. It was answered immediately by an average-looking guy dressed as a mechanic. Lingo flashed the tin and explained he was there to ask some questions about Roslin Kruse. Thompkins’s face took on a grim expression.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” he said, and ushered the detective into his home. The flat looked like the kind of place where a man lived alone—worn furniture, a few papers scattered around.

According to Thompkins, in late October, Roslin Kruse had just been released from drug rehabilitation and had no place to go. Samuel Thompkins had been hanging around a downtown gas station when Roslin came in to buy a pack of cigarettes. They struck up a conversation. Roslin told him of her plight.

“Why don’t you stay with me?” It wasn’t a “sex” thing, he would later claim; he just felt sorry for her, that’s all.

Roslin came to live with Thompkins. In return for meals, she cleaned up after him. Adamant that he was not a john, the only money he claimed he gave her was $20 so she could have a prescription from the rehab center filled.

“Then one day, it was October twenty-ninth, I remember,” Thompkins continued, “I came home for lunch at noon, which I sometimes do. Roslin wasn’t there anymore. All her clothing was stacked on a chair next to the front door. I didn’t know where she was.”

He went back to work and heard nothing more from her until Saturday, October 30, when Roslin called him and told him that she was moving out and moving back up to the area of Fiftieth Street. She wanted to be closer to the action.

That was their last conversation. Two days later, the cops found her body. He was shocked when a mutual friend told him of her death the following day.

“Where were you last night?” Lingo inquired. Even though the guy didn’t look like a suspect, everyone was a suspect in a homicide investigation until they could be ruled out.

Unless he was a sociopath who thought he could beat the machine, Thompkins sounded like he had nothing to hide. That still left Lingo with the main questions: What had happened to Roslin Kruse between late afternoon, when she spoke to Thompkins, and the late evening hour that her body turned up in Gibsonton? Who had she met that she’d pissed-off enough to get murdered?

A computer check of Ryan came up with three prior arrests, one for cocaine possession. Lingo thought his theory was looking better and better. The detective now figured that something went wrong with Ryan and Kruse’s encounter, and Ryan killed her. But something nagged at him: the guy had no record of violence. Had he suddenly snapped when a whore gave him lip and then killed her?

If he could break the guy’s alibi, then he might have his man. He picked up the phone and dialing quickly, got Linda, Ryan’s wife, to come to the phone at work.

“Pat picked me up from work at about four-thirty on Monday,” said Linda Ryan. “Then we went shopping with the kids and had dinner out. After that, we went back to our place and Pat never left the rest of the evening.”

Or so she thought. Maybe Ryan sneaked out when she was asleep, did Kruse, dumped the body, and came home. Or maybe he actually killed her earlier, dumped the body in daylight in Gibsonton when no one was around, then drove back up to Tampa and picked up his wife like nothing had happened.

After investigating Ryan’s background further, Lingo turned up Bridgette. She was “the other woman.” Ryan came to her residence at night.

On the evening of November 1, she said, he came to her place at about 7:30 and stayed until close to midnight. If that was true, she had just blown Ryan’s alibi.

Digging further, Lingo found that Ryan had once lived in Gibsonton, near where the body was discovered. He was intimately familiar with the environs.

Up to that point, Ryan had been pretty cooperative but when he found that Lingo was pressing, it became obvious that he was the prime suspect in Roslin Kruse’s murder. He retained counsel who told him to keep his mouth shut.

The rape kit came back with a positive finding for semen. Now the police could get a search warrant and get Ryan’s DNA. By plucking some hairs, taking some blood, and swabbing some saliva from his mouth, a positive match could be made. Or maybe not. Unfortunately for the cops, just like search-warrant procedures, you not only need probable cause, but a judge who agrees and signs it. They had neither. At least, so far. The investigation, though, was far from over.

She had given a talk about religion at Tomlin Junior High. One of her church’s deacons, Sam Smithers, had accompanied her.

It seemed that the talk had not gone as planned. It had to be cut down from an hour to thirty-five minutes and she’d had to improvise a bit. But Smithers felt that she had been unorganized and claimed that the church had gotten complaints about that. Two of the church’s officials, he said, had asked him to talk to her about it. But as far as Leiter was concerned, everything went fine. Except for her having to cut her talk down.

“It’s funny you should be telling me this, Sam, because my teacher contact at the school, Sela Warren, called me. She said I had done a great job and that she wanted me back.”

Smithers would not acknowledge that Warren had called. His only response was to smile. Despite the facts, it seemed that he was looking for something to criticize Leiter about.

“And I’ll tell you, Sam,” Leiter continued, “Sela told me that she was concerned about you because she felt you had broken their equipment.”

She had shown a film using their VCR. Smithers had handled the controls. Afterward, the machine was damaged.

Leiter was upset that Sam Smithers had criticized her with no foundation, upset enough to take the matter up with church officials. She asked them to clarify the calls of complaint they had taken and to get the specifics.

Donna Gavin, who worked at the First Baptist Church in Plant City, was coming to work in the morning. Her two sons accompanied her. On the way in, she encountered the church’s head custodian, Sam Smithers, outside by the Dumpster.

Smithers accompanied them inside and walked down the hallway with them, talking to Donna’s two boys in that gentle way he had. She was standing on one side and her youngest son was between Smithers and herself. They had come all the way down by the double doors going into the fellowship hall, when Smithers reached over and tugged on the end of the braid in her hair.

Then he let go of the braid and patted Gavin on the right side of her ass twice.

It had been a stupid thing to do: driving with a suspended license. It had been even more stupid getting caught doing it. Luckily, the judge was feeling in a lenient mood the day Carol Rivers came before him for sentencing and gave her ninety hours of community service at the First Baptist Church of Plant City.

Her supervisor at the church was a middle-aged man named Sam Smithers. Smithers was a Southerner by birth, originally from Tennessee, tall, laconic, sort of a Southern version of Gary Cooper. He was a nice guy whom everyone liked.

Smithers’s job as church custodian was to keep up the property, to make sure everything was in order, and to supervise people, like Rivers, who were fulfilling community service hours. Carol Rivers had just come in to do her hours and ran into Smithers.

After they chatted a bit, Rivers told Smithers, “As of this Monday, I’ll be short six hours or so in order to finish my community hours.” She needed to turn a record of her hours into her probation officer so she could be finished with her probation.

“Why don’t you come up with me to the second floor,” Smithers suggested. Up on the second floor were rooms in need of cleaning. So she followed Smithers upstairs. She started cleaning up one of the rooms. Sam was watching her.

“You know, some people are able to pay off their community service,” Smithers commented while Carol dusted. It wasn’t legal. “Some were getting caught doing it,” he added.

“Well, Sam, I’m not fortunate enough to be able to pay somebody off because if I was to pay them off, it would be my luck I would go to jail.”

He sat down at a table and said, “Well, there’s other ways that they could do it. You know, like offering your body.”

“I like looking at you,” the custodian continued, eyeing her up and down. “I’ll be here from three-thirty till five.”

“Carol, I have a wife and a child, and I know this would be embarrassing if something was to come up. You know, be an embarrassment for me here at the church because I work here, and because of my son.”

“Well, Sam, I have a ten-year-old daughter and I would never do nothing to jeopardize her or myself. I’m not going to humiliate myself, and I’m not going to humiliate my daughter.”

And he began to tell Carol Rivers a story that happened on Thursday night. It seemed that he and his wife were cooking supper when his ex-girlfriend and her ex-boyfriend, who were now married, came over and decided they were going to eat supper with them. It was getting late and the wife asked if they were going to spend the night there or what. They said they had plans over at Disney World but that didn’t start till Friday and would it be all right to spend the night there.

Sam’s wife went up to get ready for bed about ten o’clock or so. Smithers always walked his dog Oscar about the same time and when he comes back from the walk, he’s usually very sweaty. “I have a shower built in my garage,” Smithers revealed, and when he comes back from his walk, his routine is to take off his clothes and get in the shower.

“I always have a wraparound towel out in the shower and I put it on. Well, my ex-girlfriend comes out and says, ‘Sam, you look like you’re ready for some leisurely pleasure.’”

Smithers also talked about having a friend whom he flew with over the Walden Lakes area. While the friend flew, Smithers would take “graphic pictures” of the residences. He told Rivers he had another friend at a local pharmacy who would develop the film without calling the cops.

Carol Rivers had heard enough. Quickly, she got up and pushed open the door. She went out and began doing her cleaning, but Smithers’s overture bothered her terribly. She went about her business in the other rooms, pushing the dividers back to get into tight spaces that needed to be cleaned. She started vacuuming the floor and was standing right in the front door. She bent over and was adjusting the vacuum cleaner, and when she straightened up, Sam was right there by the window. She drew in a sharp breath.

She was shaking all that time, thinking about what he had said to her. As she opened the door to leave, Smithers said, “Carol, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was going to tell you something, but that’s all right. If I need you, I’ll find you in the other parts of the church. I’ve left the lights on in the rooms I want done, and when you’re done in those rooms, turn the lights out so when I do come looking for you, I’ll just look for the lights that are on.”

Rivers left, but the conversation bothered her deeply. She knew Sam Smithers had a family, but he also had a problem. And if he was bothering her, might he be bothering some of the other girls who were also doing community service?

Susan Simmons, who was one of the custodians on Smithers’s staff, was not surprised when Carol told her the story. “I had a feeling something like that was happening,” said Simmons, “a feeling inside my body.”

Rivers suddenly felt “real upset and nervous.” She went and called her mother, who said to just hang out with Susan. “Make sure you don’t leave her side,” her mother advised.

A few weeks later, Allie Walker was doing her community service at the First Baptist Church. Sam Smithers told her he needed her to come to his house.

When they got there, he took Allie for a tour of his home, both the upstairs and downstairs rooms. When they got ready to leave, he stopped at the back door and reached out for her. He started to pull up her blouse.

“This house belongs to me and my wife,” he said, continuing to struggle with her, as Walker once again pulled away. It took a few moments, but then, breathing heavily, Smithers calmed down.

“Please don’t say anything about this to anyone. I don’t care about myself, but I don’t want the church to know.”

After that, on several occasions, Smithers walked up to her and hugged her. He also tried to kiss her in the elevator several times. Walker finally had to stay close to the female custodians so Sam couldn’t harass her and she could finish her community service in peace.

Sally Talbot, another woman doing community service, reported problems with Smithers, too, saying that he was sexually harassing her. Like the others, she told her story to custodian Susan Simmons, who wrote it down as part of a report to Fred Griffith, the youth minister of the First Baptist Church, and a personal friend of Sam Smithers.

“Carol, in your mind, I’m going to use a very plain phrase here, but in your mind, was Sam making a proposition to you when he made these comments to you?” Griffith asked.

“Yes, sir, because whenever he told me … there were other ways to pay off your community hours like offering your body, he said that he liked looking at me and was standing there, eyeing me up and down.”

“Carol, is there any other comment or even personal opinion you would like to offer at this time?”

“Sam’s a very nice person and I want him to get the help that he needs. I don’t mean no hard feelings for Sam, or for a bad thing to happen to him here at the church. Overall, you know, he is a decent person. He does need help and if it’s happening with other people, I don’t know if they are strong enough or even willing enough to want to come forward. I didn’t like it happening to me, and if he gets the help that he does need, God will follow him and he will be okay.”

Because of the problems with Sam Smithers, Carol Rivers was allowed to complete the last twenty hours of her community service at a different church.

The fact that a deacon of the church had been sexually harassing some of the women performing community service was not something to be broadcast to the congregation. Nor the fact that he was also in a position of authority as the church’s head custodian. And then there were rumors.

There were rumors at the church that equipment may have been used inappropriately, equipment such as the floor scrubber, shampooer, and gas blower. Some officials of the church thought that Smithers was using the stuff without permission to do odd jobs outside the church. There were also hand tools that turned up missing while Smithers worked there. Compounded by the allegations of sexual harassment, the church knew it had to take action.

As a result of the allegations, the church pastor, personnel chair, and Griffith himself called Sam in and confronted him. Smithers attempted some half-assed denial and never made a full confession. He was given the opportunity to resign from his position.

The church suggested he seek counseling, which he did. They paid for some of it and it was their understanding that Smithers continued it. Yet, there is nothing in the record that indicates Sam Smithers ever continued counseling.

The last time Sam Smithers had had psychological counseling was back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1980. Back then, a court had mandated he get it and he had complied. But as soon as the court wasn’t looking, he stopped.

Sam Smithers didn’t think there was anything wrong with him. Why spend money on counseling when he was no different from the next guy? Sure, he might have overstepped his bounds in “coming on” to the women at the church. Sure, he might have gotten a little suggestive. And, he liked to make up stories—like the one about the shower in his garage.

Sometimes that was what his life felt like—a made-up story. He was a family man, a good man, sort of like that guy on TV, Al Bundy in Married With Children. But he wasn’t a blasphemer like Al. And while Al talked about adultery, he never seemed to do it. Smithers, on the other hand, had done it more than once, though he was too ashamed to admit it.