Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (4 page)

E R A S E D

He fabricates evidence to exaggerate his accomplishments, wealth,

success, social standing. Sometimes he proudly displays phony busi-ness cards or diplomas, awards from military service he never earned,

and other ‘‘proof’’ he needs to create the impression that he craves.

He knows how to use words, lies, and actions to manipulate others.

Manipulation—either subtle or overt—is a core feature of how he

interacts with others.

He leads what appears to be a normal and productive life and

is often considered to be an exemplary citizen. But quietly, beneath

the surface, unbeknownst to almost anyone, he has used all his

well-honed abilities to lie, manipulate, and fabricate reality in order

to commit the crown jewel of crimes, the perfect murder.

His goal is to erase his victim—be it his wife, ex-wife, girlfriend, or

lover— to expunge her from the record of his life. If she is pregnant

with a child he does not want—and an unwanted pregnancy is an

alarmingly common motive for eraser killings—he is killing two

birds with one stone, eliminating what he views as dead weight

dragging him down. In his mind, he is not really murdering a human

being; he is simply rearranging the world to better suit his needs,

to remove a major annoyance or let him make a fresh start of

things.

He harbors a cluster of psychological traits very unusual in the

general public. He does not experience the almost universal psycho-logical reaction called fear. It is not that he is uncommonly brave or

that he has ‘‘conquered’’ fear. He does experience an abstract, emo-tionally colorless sensation when put under great stress— especially

if he feels caught in a situation he is not confident he can talk his way

out of, when he is no longer in control of everyone around him. Most

of the time, any sense of truly being afraid is more like a thought than

a feeling. His heart does not beat faster, and he shows few if any signs

of the
emotion
of fear. He knows about fear a bit like a colorblind

person is aware of color: it is visible, but only as another shade of

gray.

Eraser killers employ cunning, stealth, and often meticulous plan-ning to overcome their trusting prey, frequently employing the

agonizingly slow and terror-inducing method of suffocation or stran-gulation in order to minimize the type of messy crime scene evidence

that could get them caught.

Out of the Shadows

1 9

These killers represent a previously unrecognized subset of inti-mate partner murderers, different in distinct ways from other

domestic killers:

• Their killings are not committed in the violent rage or sudden

loss of control that characterizes more classic domestic

homicides. On the contrary, they kill with total calm, total

control. If they leave behind any crime scene at all, it will be

what criminal profilers refer to as ‘‘organized’’—just the kind of

crime scene investigators do not expect to see when a domestic

homicide is involved, for that is supposed to be the most

‘‘hot-blooded,’’ disorganized, and messy of crimes.

• The eraser killer is a master of deceit and an expert manipulator.

His killing is carried out in total secrecy (unlike many domestic

homicides, which often are committed even though there are

witnesses present) and then very highly ‘‘staged,’’ to use the

investigators’ term for a crime scene that is arranged like a stage

set to create an illusion intended to confuse the police and send

them down a wrong trail.

• Most domestic homicides involve jealousy, money, another

woman, or explosive and vengeful rage felt by the killer because

the woman is planning to leave him. Although there are

sometimes subsidiary motives involving monetary gain or other

women, the eraser killer is not ‘‘driven’’ by these things. His real

motivations stem from the unique psychology of men with a

particular set of dangerous traits that psychologists have recently

named ‘‘the Dark Triad’’ of personality.

• He is killing because the woman in question has become

inconvenient. In his eyes, she no longer meets his needs, or she

stands in the way of something he wants. She is not allowed to

leave him or take away anything he holds dear, be it a home or

children or the lifestyle he has come to enjoy. He will only let her

go on his deadly, unilateral terms.

• He plans his killing well in advance, once again distinguishing

him from the standard wife-killer. Far fewer than half of all

wife-killings are actually planned in advance of the final

encounter, according to available research.

2 0

E R A S E D

• The eraser killer will exhibit neither mourning nor real signs of

emotional loss, and will almost always exhibit strangely

inappropriate behavior and speech after the mysterious death of

his wife or girlfriend. (Sometimes he even starts speaking about

her in the past tense
before
he has killed her.) Although he may

actively participate in the search for a missing loved one, he will

be using his full array of skills to direct any inquiries or police

investigation toward fictitious threats and other suspects and

away from himself.

• He may have hidden his contempt for the object of his enmity,

especially if doing so gives him tactical advantage when the

moment of attack arrives. But once he makes up his mind to

erase his victim, his determination is all-consuming. When the

act begins—once he puts his hands around her throat or strikes

her with a heavy object as she sleeps—there is no twinge of

conscience or compassion.

• He is generally intelligent, though he also greatly overestimates

his talents. He believes he is smarter and better than the rest of

us, certainly smarter than the police and more deserving in all

ways than his victim. He often has considerable familiarity with

the law and with how the police work. He may have read up on

these matters diligently to help him with his plan. Or he may

have used his unusual ability for absorbing things around him,

observing with the cold eye of a lizard in the desert how other

predators kill and get away with it, because getting away with

murder is his goal.

• To achieve that goal, he may follow one of two distinct strategies.

Either he can erase the victim’s body by destroying it entirely or

secreting it where it won’t be found, or he can rearrange the

crime or stage a wholly false scenario to erase all connection

between himself and any criminal act. Either way, he appears to

remain free and clear of any involvement in a dastardly act.

Although men have been carrying out this kind of crime for

centuries, it is only now that the extraordinary glare of television

lights and an almost ‘‘shock-and-awe’’ level of news coverage are

beginning to drive him out of the safety of the darkness. But without

an actual name for this crime and for this killer, it is still hard for

us to make sense of these crimes, to find the hidden clues, and solve

Out of the Shadows

2 1

what too often and quite tragically remain unsolved mysteries. As

criminal profilers have discovered, truth and resolution can be found

only by ferreting out the unseen links and connections between these

seemingly disparate cases.

I believe these killers are best described as
eraser killers
, because

that term describes simply and succinctly both their motive and

their methods. Their victims are not ‘‘missing women’’ or ‘‘vanished

wives.’’ They are women who have been erased, just as repressive

political regimes have used the method of ‘‘forced disappearances’’

to dispose of their enemies and strike terror into all those who

oppose them. The impact of so many women being ‘‘erased’’ or

‘‘disappeared’’ from our very midst, from communities or homes we

have assumed in some fundamental sense to be ‘‘safe,’’ is overwhelm-ing and undermines so many fundamentals on which our sense of

trust and security is based. These eraser killers exploit the funda-mental safeguards of our legal system—principles enshrined in our

constitution to protect honest citizens from unreasonable searches

of their property and from being forced or coerced into making a

false confession—as if those honored protections were simply escape

hatches built to provide safe haven for someone capable of pulling

off an expert murder.

By following a series of threads, beginning with Laci Peterson and

then going back and forth in time to hundreds of other instances

of mysteriously disappeared women, I discovered that most of the

cases fit a distinct pattern or profile of a startlingly prevalent type

of murder, yet one that had never been identified because we have

tended to look at each case in a vacuum.

Most were not missing persons cases in any strict sense of the

word, but elaborately planned and premeditated domestic homicides

disguised to appear to be mysterious vanishings. Invariably, the

person responsible for the woman’s disappearance was her current

or former husband or boyfriend. Although some recent killers even

cited Scott Peterson as their inspiration, he was hardly the first to

come up with such an idea. Looking back in time, I traced the same

pattern back a century to the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s

literary classic,
An American Tragedy
.

Although the essential facts of these cases bear a striking similarity,

the outcomes vary widely. Many ‘‘disappeared’’ women are never

found, and no one is ever held to account for what happened to them.

A few victims—the ‘‘lucky’’ ones, in a manner of speaking—are

2 2

E R A S E D

eventually discovered, often by pure chance or an act of nature. Their

families get a chance to bury their loved ones, or what is left of them,

and sometimes their killers are brought to justice. A small number

of presumed killers are tried and convicted in the absence of a body;

others are acquitted with or without a body because there is not

enough evidence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable

doubt that a murder occurred, much less that the woman’s intimate

partner was the one responsible.

The victims of these killers are women of all races and social

classes, from all parts of the country (and around the world as well).

Whereas some have been the subject of intensive media coverage,

others are all but unknown beyond their closest loved ones.

All the women listed here are dead or presumed to be dead.

All were murdered or are believed by authorities to have been

murdered by a husband or boyfriend, falling victim precisely because

of their physical and emotional vulnerability to their killer. All ‘‘went

missing’’ under mysterious circumstances, but none of these women

was ever truly lost. They didn’t wander off, run away from home,

suffer amnesia and forget where they belonged. They were deliberately

‘‘disappeared’’ by someone who had good reason to try to make sure

they would never be found, someone who wanted to erase them from

the face of the earth.

Q

• Hattie ‘‘Fern’’ Bergeler, fifty-seven, was found floating in the

bay near her Florida home in August 2002 with a bedsheet wrapped

around her head and cinderblocks tied to her neck and ankles. Her

multimillionaire husband, Robert Moringiello, a retired aerospace

engineer, claimed the two had lost sight of each other while driving

in separate cars to visit his children. But he had still not reported her

missing by the time her remains were identified—a month after he

claimed to have lost her in traffic. Despite a wealth of physical

evidence—the sheet, rope, and cinderblocks and the gun used to kill

Fern, also fished from the water behind their Fort Myers Beach

home, were all tied to her husband, and cleaned-up blood was found

in the house—it took two trials to convict him of second-degree

murder. A man of Moringiello’s intelligence and character would

never have made so many stupid mistakes, his attorney had

argued.

Out of the Shadows

2 3

• Isabel Rodriguez, thirty-nine, vanished in November 2001 two

weeks after seeking a protective order against her estranged

husband, Jesus, who she said threatened to kill her if she was

awarded any money from him in their divorce. In the days before

her disappearance, her husband ordered ten truckloads of dirt and

gravel delivered to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of the Florida

Everglades. On the day she went missing, a witness saw a fire

burning for hours on the property. Jesus had told all his farmhands

not to come to work that day, explaining to one that he was planning

a Santeria ‘‘cleansing’’ ritual on the property. Police believe he killed

his wife that day, burned her corpse on the farm, and scattered the

ashes under the dirt and gravel. He claims she returned to her native

Honduras, abandoning their two children, but there is no record of

her leaving the United States or entering Honduras. Not long after

his wife disappeared, he began seeing another woman, who looks

uncannily like his missing wife and whose name even happens to be

Isabel. At the time this book was written, prosecutors were preparing

for a third trial after two previous efforts ended in mistrial.

• Kristine Kupka, twenty-eight, was just two months away from

graduating with a degree in philosophy from Baruch College in New

York City when she vanished without a trace in 1998. She was also

five months pregnant by one of her professors, Darshanand ‘‘Rudy’’

Persaud, who did not confess to her that he was married until after

she became pregnant. He was so adamant that she get rid of the baby

that she began to fear he might hurt her. Kupka left her apartment

with Persaud on the day she disappeared. Although he admits seeing

her that day, he denies harming her or having any knowledge of her

whereabouts, and no charges have ever been brought against him or

anyone else.

• Lisa Tu of Potomac, Maryland, a forty-two-year-old Chinese

immigrant caring for two teenagers and her elderly mother,

disappeared in 1988. Tu’s common-law husband, Gregory, a

Washington, D.C., restaurant manager heavily in debt from

business failures and gambling losses, said she never returned from a

trip to San Francisco to visit a sick friend. But police believe he killed

her as she slept on their couch, then attempted to assume a new

identity, traveling to Las Vegas, forging checks under her name,

stealing from her son’s college fund, and enjoying the services of

prostitutes. A first-degree murder conviction was overturned when

2 4