Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (5 page)

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an appeals court ruled that evidence seized from his Las Vegas hotel

room was improperly admitted. In the retrial, he was found guilty of

second-degree murder.

• Pegye Bechler, a physical therapist and mother of three,

disappeared in 1997 while boating off the Southern California coast

with her husband to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and

her thirty-eighth birthday. Eric Bechler claimed she was piloting a

rented speedboat and towing him on a boogie board when she was

washed overboard by a rogue wave. Although Pegye was an expert

swimmer who completed in triathlons, Bechler claimed she never

surfaced, and no sign of her has ever been found. After sobbing for

the cameras about his devastating loss, Bechler took up with another

woman just three months after his wife’s disappearance, an actress

and lingerie model; she agreed to wear a wire for police. Having

been recorded describing how he bashed his wife over the head with

a barbell, then attached the weights to her body and dumped her at

sea, he was convicted of first-degree murder.

• Lisa Thomas’s rocky marriage turned strangely amicable in the

summer of 1996 when she and her husband of eight years finally

agreed to divorce. Then the thirty-six-year-old mother of two

vanished on the same weekend she planned to begin looking for her

own place to live. Her husband, Bryce, seemed remarkably

nonchalant about the fact that his wife was missing, and refused to

allow police into their Bakersfield, California, apartment. Lisa’s

frantic twin sister, Theresa Seabolt, broke in and found the

underside of the couple’s mattress, which had been flipped, soaked

in blood. Only then did Lisa’s husband move into action, setting up

a tip line and pleading for the public’s help in finding his wife.

Although Lisa’s body was never found, a jury convicted her husband

of second-degree murder. But the verdict was almost immediately

thrown into question when one of the jurors accused fellow

panelists of not following the judge’s instructions. Facing the

possibility of a new trial, Bryce Thomas attempted to hire a hit man

(who was actually an undercover sheriff’s investigator) from his jail

cell to eliminate his wife’s twin, the woman he believed responsible

for putting him behind bars. Dictating a scenario identical to the

one he carried out against his wife—presumably in the hope that it

would appear that the same person killed both sisters—he asked the

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purported hit man to kill his sister-in-law in her sleep, then make

her body disappear, leaving just a little trail of blood ‘‘because that’s

similar to what happened to the one I’m accused of murdering.’’

Ultimately, the trial judge allowed the conviction for killing his wife

to stand, and handed down a sentence of fifteen years to life. He was

subsequently convicted and sentenced to another twelve years for

trying to arrange the murder of Theresa Seabolt.

• Jami Sherer, twenty-six, mother of a two-year-old son,

disappeared in Redmond, Washington, in 1990 the day after telling

her husband, Steven, that she wanted a divorce and was moving

back in with her parents. At her husband’s insistence, she had gone

to meet him one last time, but never returned. Within hours of that

meeting, days before her car was discovered abandoned with her

packed suitcase still inside, Sherer began telling family members that

his wife was ‘‘missing.’’ Ten years later, still maintaining that his

missing wife was alive somewhere as a jury found him guilty of

murder, he lashed out at his wife’s family: ‘‘When Jami does turn

up, you can all rot in hell!’’

• Peggy Dianovsky, twenty-eight at the time of her

disappearance, vanished from her suburban Chicago home in 1982,

leaving no trace of her existence. Her husband, Robert, admitted

striking her during an argument with enough force to splatter blood

on a stairway in the couple’s home. But he insisted that she packed a

bag and left that night, never to be seen again—without taking her

car or her three children. Twenty-two years later, he was acquitted

of her murder in a bench trial, despite testimony from two of her

now grown sons, who said they witnessed their father hit their

mother and hold a knife to her throat in the hours leading up to her

disappearance. A family friend also testified that several months

before Peggy went missing, Robert Dianovsky asked him to help

dispose of his wife’s body and outlined a plan to make her killing

look like suicide. The friend declined to participate in Dianovsky’s

schemes, telling him that he would never get away with it—an

incorrect assumption, as it would turn out.

Q

The sheer callousness of eraser crimes is breathtaking, not just the

murders themselves but the actions taken after the fact to cover them

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up. As if taking the life of women they were supposed to love is not

cruel enough, these killers afford their victims no solace or dignity

even after death.

• Stephen Grant, who reported his wife missing on Valentine’s

Day 2007, is accused of strangling thirty-four-year-old Tara several

days before, hacking her body into pieces at the tool-and-die shop

where he worked, then burying the pieces in a Michigan park. He

was caught three weeks later when he ghoulishly retrieved the largest

piece of his wife’s remains, her torso, and brought it back to his home

for safekeeping after learning that investigators were searching in

the area where he hid the body. Although he confessed at the time of

his arrest, he has since entered a not-guilty plea and is awaiting trial.

• Thomas Capano, one of Delaware’s most prominent attorneys,

a former prosecutor, mayoral chief-of-staff, and an chief legal

counsel to the state’s governor, shot his girlfriend, Anne Marie

Fahey, to death in 1996, then dumped her body sixty miles out to sea

inside a giant Igloo cooler. When the ice chest failed to sink because

of its natural buoyancy, he pulled her out, wrapped chains and boat

anchors around her, and sank her to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Although no body was ever found, Capano’s younger brother, who

drove him out to sea that day in his boat, eventually admitted to

police that he had seen the corpse sink below the ocean surface. He

was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999 and sentenced to

death, but the sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

• Robert Bierenbaum, a brilliant Manhattan surgeon and licensed

pilot, is believed to have dropped the corpse of his wife, Gail, from a

rented plane into the Atlantic Ocean in 1985. He was convicted of

second-degree murder, but not until fifteen years after the crime.

• Ira Einhorn, a counterculture icon and widely revered peace

and environmental activist, shattered the skull of his girlfriend,

Holly Maddux, in 1977, then locked her— still alive—inside a

steamer trunk in their apartment. When police finally gained access

to the apartment a year and a half later and discovered her body,

Einhorn insisted he had been set up by the CIA or possibly the KGB,

that Holly’s body was planted in a grand frame-up to silence him

because of his radical views and research into ‘‘sensitive’’ areas. Ira

was so well regarded in certain circles as the embodiment of peace

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that many influential acolytes bought that far-fetched story,

lobbying for his release on bail and even posting his bond. Just

before trial, he fled to Europe, where he managed to elude justice for

a quarter century, living for much of that time happily and openly as

a country gentleman in the south of France. After a long extradition

battle, he was finally returned to the United States, where he was

convicted in 2001 and sentenced to death.

Q

Eraser killings raise such disturbing questions—can we ever really

know anyone, can we trust those closest to us?— that we have not

wanted to ask them. We don’t want to believe that someone we let

into our heart or our bed could be capable of such monstrous cruelty.

We cling to the illusion that danger is something outside ourselves,

at a distance, easily identifiable, like the stranger in the alley we can

avoid by being safe and prudent.

But the truth is that except in a few notorious cases involving serial

killers or sexual predators, grown women are not stolen off the street

or ripped from the safety of their own homes by perfect strangers,

never to be seen again dead or alive. Despite what Scott Peterson’s

defense attorneys wanted us to believe, we need not live in fear of

mysterious men in vans or homeless people or satanic cults. Young

women, and especially young pregnant women, are most in danger

from the men they love.

More than a thousand women a year are murdered in America

by an intimate partner. Many of those women, about seven in ten,

bear the scars of years of male rage directed at them precisely because

of their proximity and vulnerability. Others trust their partners

implicitly and have no inkling of what lies ahead.

In the last year for which statistics are available, eighteen hundred

women in the United States were murdered by men, more than half of

those by a current or former husband or boyfriend. Intimate partner

homicide is a truly one-sided phenomenon, as less than 5 percent of

male murder victims are killed by their wife or girlfriend.

One of the most disturbing and perplexing aspects of the Peterson

case was the fact that Laci was nearly eight months pregnant at the

time she was murdered. It was unthinkable to most people that a

man could kill not only his wife but also his unborn son. Yet young

women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine—women in

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their prime childbearing years—are most likely to be killed by their

partner. In fact, pregnancy may place them at greater risk of being

murdered.

Recent studies from several states and cities across the country

have found homicide to be the number one cause of death among

pregnant women and that women continue to be at increased risk

for being murdered for up to a year after giving birth.

An analysis of five years of death records in Maryland revealed that

a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to die from

homicide than any other cause whatsoever. Homicide was discovered

to be the single biggest cause of injury-related death among pregnant

and postpartum women in New York City and Cook County, Illinois,

and among women up to a year after giving birth in the state of

Georgia. Researchers reviewing eight years of autopsy records of

reproductive-age women in the District of Columbia found murder

to be the second most common cause of death among pregnant

women, just one death behind medical complications related to

pregnancy.

A 2005 study that attempted to look at the problem nationally

found homicide to be the second leading cause of injury death in

pregnant and postpartum women, behind motor vehicle accidents.

But Isabelle Horon and Diana Cheng, authors of the Maryland

study, believe that the national study seriously undercounted the

number of pregnancy-associated homicides because it looked solely

at voluntarily submitted death certificates for women who died

during pregnancy or within a year of delivery.

In their own 2001 study, the two researchers from Maryland’s

state Department of Health found that only a small portion of

pregnancy-associated deaths could be determined from death cer-tificates. The rate of homicide reported in the national study was

suspiciously low compared to the earlier regional studies, six times

lower than what the Maryland researchers found in their state by

using medical examiner and other records in addition to death

certificates.

In any event, it is clear that the true number of pregnant or

recently pregnant women who are murdered is higher than anyone

has yet estimated, as pregnancy is not even looked for in all autopsies

and may go undetected when women are killed in early stages of

pregnancy. Nor are the numbers of ‘‘erased’’ women whose bodies

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are never found to be autopsied or to be issued a death certificate

included in any of these studies.

Although murder is the most extreme form of a larger epidemic

of domestic violence—an estimated two to four million American

women are physically assaulted by their partner every year—the rate

of homicide just within families in this country is higher than the

total homicide rates in most other Western industrialized nations.

Eraser killers represent a small and highly pathological subset of

the larger group of men who commit what is known as intimate

femicide. Their means, methods, and motives are distinct in almost

every way from those of the more ‘‘ordinary’’ spousal killer.

One of the most important differences is that many of the men

who commit a more typical domestic homicide never even leave the

crime scene or attempt to deny their culpability. Some call police

immediately afterwards to turn themselves in, and a significant

percentage take their own life as well (whether this is motivated by

any genuine sense of remorse or merely by the fear of punishment

is debatable). A recent Canadian study found that half of men who

had killed their intimate partners contemplated killing themselves

afterward, and up to 40 percent of the men claim they tried to kill

themselves. Although the exact numbers vary, the surprisingly high

percentage of men who commit suicide after killing their intimate

partner is validated by numerous studies both in the United States

and Canada.

Those who kill both their partner and their children, whom

criminologists refer to as ‘‘family annihilators,’’ very often take their

own lives as well.

By contrast, true eraser killers hardly ever commit suicide. They

feel no guilt for what they have done. In fact, they feel entitled to

kill anyone who stands in the way of their happiness. And they do

not fear punishment because they are thoroughly convinced they will

never be held accountable. Only in the rarest of instances will they

ever admit their crimes.

C H A P T E R

T W O

The Dark Triad

Q Eraserkillersoftenleaveanunwittingtrailofevi-dence that points to their secret motivations, a series of clues that

can help us understand what really happened and why. The trail is

fragmented and twisting, but the clues are intelligible once we find

an appropriate key with which to decipher them.

The most damning evidence against Scott Peterson at his trial was

the complete lack of concern he displayed toward his missing wife,

captured most vividly in unguarded moments with Amber Frey—the

girlfriend who turned against him when she discovered Peterson had

not only a wife but a missing one, and agreed to surreptitiously tape

her telephone conversations with him. Listening to the tapes from

the first crucial days of Laci’s disappearance, when Scott should have

been consumed with worry but instead seemed to be a man without

a care in the world, it is clear that Laci and Conner were dead to Scott

long before he killed them.

Eraser killers are not driven by bloodlust, like sadists who claim

they only feel alive when they are inflicting pain and terror on their

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The Dark Triad

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victims. Nor are they clinically or legally insane, compelled by voices

or visions that command them to hurt those around them. These men

kill for sheer convenience. Their actions are dispassionate, almost

businesslike, yet their crimes are unimaginably cruel. They know what

they are doing is wrong, but they do it anyway because they believe that

rules don’t apply to them— not when it is something they really want.

Eraser killers like Scott Peterson feel no remorse either immediately

after their crimes or during the protracted scrutiny of a police

investigation, which can wear down criminals for whom toughness

is only a front. They almost never show any emotion at trial, even

when the most graphic evidence of their crimes is presented.

At moments in the Scott Peterson trial so wrenching that they

brought nearly everyone in the gallery to tears—even hardened

detectives and reporters—I was taken aback by the placidity on the

defendant’s face. Throughout the trial he listened with rapt, almost

bemused attention to the evidence against him—no matter how

painful, embarrassing, or incriminating—as if fascinated to be the

center of so much attention.

He watched himself with cool regard, projected larger than life on

a giant courtroom screen, as he told blatant lies on national television,

claiming he informed police ‘‘that very first night’’ Laci went missing

that he was having an affair with another woman.

He sat stoically through hours of secretly recorded audiotapes,

listening to himself casually deceive everyone who knew and cared

about him, including his own mother; kibitz for hours on end with

his girlfriend about his favorite books and movies, his weight, and

his New Year’s resolutions while the rest of the world feverishly

looked for his wife; and spin fantastical tales in which he claimed to

be in Paris, watching fireworks explode above the Eiffel Tower with

his friends Pasqual and Franc¸ois, when he was really in Modesto at

a candlelight vigil for his missing wife, ducking the media and his

devastated in-laws.

He looked with equanimity at gruesome photos of his wife’s rav-aged remains and listened dispassionately to the medical examiner

describe the horrific facts of underwater decomposition—how bar-nacles were growing on Laci’s exposed bones, how the only organ

remaining in her body after four months in a bay teeming with sea

life was her uterus.

During the three months of jury selection that preceded the

trial, before his parents began attending, he laughed and joked with

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