The following documents include the contents of files subpoenaed from two private investigators hired by the family of Marcus Brainby, along with supplementary clips and transcripts assembled by my office to provide context for this closed commission’s members. To understand the crimes that were committed, one must understand the city they were committed in. Though that city still exists today, it is much changed. A look back to the contemporary mood, the anxieties of the people as expressed by the press, might help us understand today how such a spasmodic lapse of reason could have gripped 8 million people and then let go just as suddenly in such a short period of time.

I am not sure the commission will find answers to some of its most pressing questions here, but I hope these documents will supplement the other testimony and physical evidence presented. It is my belief that understanding why we reacted to what happened in the way we did – even if we cannot understand exactly what happened in the first place – will help us avoid another similar episode. Either way, I hope you will make a careful consideration about whether to make these documents, and the findings of this commission, public at some date in the future.

Though it may be said that legends will grow again in the absence of sunlight shining on the facts, some of these very facts might also cause hysteria on their own. I’ll let the commission be the judge of this.

-M. Washington

NYPD Special Investigative Task Force

July 9, 2008

1.

Transcript of the undated digital audio diaries of Drew Stubbfield.

There are certain women you just don’t see. They blend in with the dull gray steel in subway cars and, chameleon-like, remain invisible against the brown brick of East Side high-rises. They walk far from the curb, or in the gravel and refuse in the gutters of the street, wearing cloth handkerchiefs over permed hair.

You’d smell her only if you ran into her. Even then you’d have to stoop and put your nose in the collar of her expensive overcoat and draw a deep breath to get the smell of her skin. When you finally found the scent, the sweet flannel would remind you that this woman, though she hangs her head when she walks, lives in an apartment like nothing you’ve ever seen. But the old damp smell of sagging arms and the waddle under her chin tell you you’d have to close your eyes tight to get inside.

When you’re inside, though, the windows are worth the hassle. The perfect cut of the frames. The absence of paint or sloppy caulk on any of the glass. The clarity of the city lights at night through the beveled panes. The view from her couch. These are the rewards you’ve sought.

You won’t touch the liquor in her cabinet. She keeps it in crystal, unlabeled, and pours herself something clear the moment you arrive.

On her mantel, you find pictures of a family, beautiful and gray. She has successful children, tall and fit and far away, and a dead husband who looked like George Plimpton. Her gin breath is really not that bad.

This is the easiest type.        

I’ll start with one of these.

2.

A featured article in the January 15, 2006 edition of New York Press.

The Dog Trainer by Mark Alton

“At a certain point, we started seeing whole packs of wild dogs down in the streets by the canal, even out to Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. I’d be walking my crew of six Dobermans out on 2nd Avenue and right in the center of the street under a red light a block away, there’s twelve or thirteen dogs – Pinschers, German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Pit Bulls – all baring their teeth and growling.”

Marcus Brainby eats donut after donut as he tells me this at the diner where he asked me to meet him on 7th Avenue. It’s called The Donut Luncheonette, the sort of old Brooklyn place fast disappearing from this part of Park Slope. Two eggs and potatoes and toast cost you $2, and you can sit as long as you want at the counter with a bottomless cup of coffee. Marcus tries each of fifteen kinds of donuts. The Greek guy behind the counter doesn’t care. He’s more friendly with Marcus than with me, maybe because I don’t order anything.

“Now, my crew is tight. They’re up on the roof and so much as a pigeon lands they get right on it and fuck shit up, leave just a lump of bloody feathers behind. On the street, an old boy with the wrong complexion and some pissy homeless smell on him is walking a block away and my crew is jumping out their leashes to get at him. But twelve or thirteen dogs looking all wild and hungry? I leave that kind of shit alone, and so do my dogs. But I see it down there more and more these days.”

Marcus wears jeans with huge wide legs, holes at the knees, and a clean, pressed t-shirt, much too big for him, so his big muscular arms look skinny in the sleeves. He speaks with a city swagger and articulateness you don’t expect from someone who trains guard dogs for a living.  When he finishes his last donut and invites me to his home, he calls it his “palatial estate” and snickers. We take the F train one stop to 4th Avenue. In the ten years I’ve lived in New York, I don’t think I’ve ever taken the train such a short distance. Not for wind or rain or sleet or snow.

Marcus doesn’t like to walk without his dogs more than he has to, even in the thoroughly gentrified part of Park Slope he goes to for his donut fix. From 4th Avenue we take the B61 two more blocks down to 2nd Avenue. This short bus ride beats the F train to 4th as the shortest public transit trip I’ve ever taken.

“It’s important to live with the dogs.  I know some guys who don’t.  They live in apartments out in Bensonhurst and drive in every day and do drills with the dogs. You don’t get the kind of quality guard dog I got doing shit like that. You have to make them trust you before they’ll listen. Once they do, they’re like putty in your hands.”

Marcus lifts a huge aluminum sliding door on the front of a warehouse building on 5th Street between 2nd Avenue and the canal. Inside, the concrete floor is swept clean. Along the back wall, in a massive chain link cage, six Dobermans slumber on the floor in cushioned dog beds. Each of them tenses and opens one eye, so I see six glowing yellow irises in the dim warehouse. The dogs relax when Marcus speaks.

“If you don’t give your dogs at least one human being they can trust just as much as any member of their pack, you create a fuckin monster. I seen these dogs, mostly Pits, their owners just beat the shit out of them, scream at them like they’re animals.” I fail to remind Marcus that Pit Bulls are, in fact animals.

“One of two things happens. One, the dog becomes a sniveling little cry baby, tucks its tail every time somebody walks by. Two, the dog jumps for the jugular any chance he gets.  Don’t matter who it is. It’s all part of the same mechanism. Survival.”

When I ask Marcus if he ever turns cruel pet owners in to the authorities, he looks at me like I’ve just kicked one of his dogs or stolen one of his donuts.

“Naw, man. That shit works itself out. We got enough little white kids in strollers in the neighborhood to feed the city’s fucked up Pits.”

He laughs at this. I think it’s a joke, but I’m not sure.

Marcus considers himself one of the “pack,” though he doesn’t use that word. When he calls this group of six Dobermans his “crew” he’s using the term in the urban colloquial. These are his friends.

He shows me an elaborate control center on a desk on one side of the warehouse. It consists of seven security monitors, a laser trip wire censor with three blinking gauges - Marcus calls these light his “Richter Scale” - and an expensive laptop he uses to read dog training message boards.

When he opens the chain link gate to the cage at the back of the warehouse, I flinch, but the Dobermans don’t move. Marcus gets down on all fours, and I see why there are holes in the knees of his jeans.

I don’t read the Bible regularly, but I remember a verse forbidding man to lie with dogs. Marcus Brainby lies with his dogs. He gets inside each padded dog bed and spoons every one of the six Dobermans in his crew. He kisses their necks fondly. There’s nothing sexual about this. The dogs sigh contentedly when he touches them.

But then Marcus walks back out of the cage and locks the door behind him. He slides the heels of his white sneakers together and stands rigid, at attention.

“Heyyyyy-up!” he shouts.

The Dobermans hop up and line themselves in single file behind the door. Later, Marcus tells me about a strict hierarchy in his crew. Marcus, of course, is at the top and then each of the dogs knows its place behind its superior. They always line up in the same order. But now, when I ask him to explain what’s going on, he holds a hand out and shushes me.

The Dobermans wait in line as Marcus walks across the warehouse to a small door in the corner. When he comes back out through the door, he wears a padded white jumpsuit and a long red oven mitt on his left hand and forearm. The first dog springs out when he opens the chain link door, but the other dogs wait.

The first dog sits obediently on an X spray-painted on the warehouse floor until Marcus screams ‘Attack!’ and ducks his head and holds his left hand hooked out in front of him. The dog bares its teeth and bounds across to Marcus and bites at the red oven mitt.

Marcus’s whole frame cowers and shakes. The dog’s mouth starts to foam. This rage continues for a few minutes. The dogs in line behind the door remain silent and still. The first dog’s gums begin to bleed and the spray hits Marcus’s white jumpsuit. The dog trainer has become a piece of absurd Dutch splatter art.

When Marcus finishes, I ask him if the dog’s mouth should be bleeding.

“It’s normal. A sign of excitement.”

I ask him if this is cruel.

“Naw, man. I love my dogs. They don’t feel shit, they’re so amped about attacking. They love this.”

*

Under the lights from the BQE, the huge inflatable gorilla wearing boxing gloves on the roof of the tire place up on 15th Street reminds me of Marcus in his dog training suit. This gorilla along with the squared KenTile sign next door and the decaying Bruno Trucks billboard across the street stand like enormous monoliths, the last remaining vestiges of some gritty commercial heyday on the banks of the Gowanus Canal.

After he shows me his dog training routine I ask Marcus if he’d be willing to take me up on the roof for one of his crew’s night jobs. Some of the warehouses further south on 2nd Avenue still hire teams of guard dogs for roof duty, even though electronic security systems have become more affordable than the rates Marcus and his competitors charge. Marcus makes me promise not to publish this. I convince him his clients won’t read my story.

At first, Marcus resists my request, but I tell him the only way for me to get a real feel for his crew’s capabilities would be to see them in the field, firsthand, to become one of the pack, if just for one night. This gets the better of him. He smiles with pride. Maybe he’s daydreaming of his dogs as literary sensations.

The BQE snakes over the buildings cluttering the east side of Hamilton Avenue and the drawbridge at 9th Street, the big highway structure a gross mutation of the Roman aqueduct, a patchwork of concrete fixes and blue tarps tied under its belly. It groans like a restless beast sticking its tongue into the East River.

The Dobermans don’t notice. This is their world.

A week after I first met him at The Donut Luncheonette, Marcus Brainby lets his dogs run up and down a mountain of fine coarse gravel piled in a bare lot behind a shopping center at Smith Street. We’re on our way to the roof job and the street lights are on all over Brooklyn.

Marcus’s crew never barks, no matter how excited they get, tramping on the dusty mound. Their paws leave trails in the gravel, and by the time they finish playing, their coats are ghost gray. I’ve found real life hell hounds and I feel more secure in their presence than I’ve ever felt walking the streets of New York by myself.

We access the roof of the warehouse on 13th Street via a set of stairs, a fire escape wrought from some black metal impervious to rust. The dogs follow behind Marcus in their hierarchical order. I bring up the rear.

The roof is mostly featureless between the two foot tall white brick walls on all sides. A few mushroom-head vents spin in the center and a small bronzed knob sticks up from a full-sized door built flat into the surface of the roof in one corner. It’s this door, apparently, we’re here to protect. I wouldn’t know how to open it with a clear way and the right key.

Three of the Dobermans bolt to the other corners, and the other three sit directly on top of the door.

Marcus sits on the wall between two of his dogs. He offers me a donut from a baker’s dozen in a box from The Donut Luncheonette.

“This kinda work makes me believe dogs got more serious minds than men. I can’t stand just doing nothing for hours and hours.”

He pulls a stack of crossword books from the back pocket of his huge jeans.

“But the dogs, as long as they’re fed, could sit up here for the rest of their lives guarding that one entryway. They don’t need entertainment. They don’t take breaks. Hell, I’ve even taught them to sleep in shifts.”

Marcus is right. The night is boring. The dogs hardly stir. The traffic on the BQE barrels on and on, shoveling shit, in the form of people and produce, from the rest of the country into the city that never sleeps.

I break down and take one of Marcus’s donuts and wonder what pile of garbage we’re protecting from what wretched refuse. I drift off lying in a comfortable down sleeping bag. In my dreams I see all this concrete around me crumbling and falling into the canal.

3.

From the blotter section of the February 7, 2006 edition of New York Press.

Ill Attired

Police arrested 23-year old Terrence London on the eastbound side of the BQE just past the Prospect Expressway exit early last Wednesday morning. London had pulled his car halfway onto the shoulder and parked, blocking one lane of commuter traffic toward the Battery Tunnel.  Wearing a tank top screen-printed with the Gizmo character from Gremlins and a short-short pair of Umbros, London climbed to the roof of his ’85 Ford Crown Victoria and called the police on his cell phone.

The police later told New York Press that London claimed he saw the huge crumbling black edifice of the New York Harbor Granary building swaying back and forth as if it were about to implode. He refused, upon police request, to come down from the roof of his vehicle.  London spent the night in jail, while the arresting officers checked the overall structural integrity of the Granary by parking in the abandoned adjacent lot and snapping a picture for their commanding officer.

One is left wondering not so much why London cared about the Granary’s fate more than the police but why, in the middle of February, he was driving to work in a tank top and short shorts.

Perhaps his cell mate found out.

4.

Transcript of 911 call made by Terrence London from his cell phone on February 2, 2006.

Dispatcher.  911. What is your emergency?

London.  There’s a fucking body hanging on the side of this building!  I think it’s all bloody, but it might be alive!

Dispatcher.  Please stay calm, sir. Can you please give me your location?

London.  I’m on the goddamn highway and nobody’s stopping. I tried to stop like twelve people in their cars, but everybody just keeps driving by. I can’t believe it.

Dispatcher.  What highway are you on, sir?

London.  The BQE. The building’s this huge concrete thing off by the water in front of the Statue of Liberty. It’s all black over most of it with huge tubes like silos. I’ve never noticed it before.

Dispatcher.  Sir, do you see a green marker on the side of the road with a number on it?

London.  You know, I was just singing along with a song on the radio and I happened to look over and there’s this mutilated body up there, staring down at me. Holy shit! (He screams.)  It just moved. The person’s alive! You’ve got to send somebody now!

Dispatcher.  Sir, we would be happy to help you with your emergency, but you’re going to have to calm down and find a green marker so we can tell where you are. Are you able to do that?

London.  Oh my God! Okay, okay. Yes, hold on one second. (Horns honk and a truck’s engine shifts as London holds his phone away from his ear.)

Dispatcher.  Sir, are you still there?

London.  Yes, I found it.  The green sign says 93.4.  Come fast, please.

Dispatcher.  We’ve just dispatched our nearest squad car and an ambulance. We’re going to need you to stay calm and hold tight, okay?

London.  I can do that. Thank you.

Dispatcher.  Hold on the line, sir. I’m going to have to ask you a few more questions.

London.  What kind of fucking monster would do something like this to somebody? (He laughs.) At first I thought the body was some sort of graffiti or a statue or some shit. Some people think this sort of thing is art.  I can’t fucking he’s still alive.

Dispatcher.  Sir, are you in a safe location?

London.  Safe location? Not if there’s some monster roaming the city nailing people up on buildings. Shit no, I’m not in a safe location!

Dispatcher.  Can you please go back into your car and park it in a safe location, sir? It sounds like you might be holding up traffic.

London.  Traffic!?! Are you kidding me? The body is moving! Did you hear me? There’s a person suffering, fuckin crucified on the side of the highway and people are just driving right on by, pissed off because I’m making them late for work.

Dispatcher.  Yes, sir, but…

London.  Oh my God! The body’s gone. I swear to God, I looked away and it just disappeared.

Dispatcher.  Please calm down, sir. I understand you are upset and confused, but our officers will be there in a few minutes and they will clear everything up for you. Okay?

London.  You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe me. And the cops aren’t going to believe me either. Everybody’s going to think I’m crazy, but I saw a goddamn body up there.

Dispatcher.  Sir, can you give me your full name.

The line goes dead.

5.

From the review section of the December 7, 2005 edition of New York Press.

Marginal Marginalia by Stephen Ketchum

The only bit of found art worth finding at the recent Washed Ashore exhibit at CanalSpace Studios on 3rd Avenue at 12th Street, I happened to find tucked in a corner of the cavernous loft gallery behind black curtains.

A thirteen inch black and white tube television monitor sat on an old laminate school desk. The windows into the concrete yard behind CanalSpace were blacked over with paper, so the only light in this curtained corner came from the small screen. A three minute video looped infinitely. I stood with a group of people, the few adventurous Park Slopers who dared come this close to the Gowanus Canal. Unvaryingly these are the more single, less wealthy types from the south side of the neighborhood. Not one of us left the corner for at least three iterations of the video.

Grainy security footage flickered and showed a scene on the banks of the canal, behind a warehouse building, indistinguishable from the building we stood in as we watched. A man stumbled into the frame with a large dog on a leash. The man’s fat upper body hulked over his small legs.

He yanked on the leash. The dog resisted. Its thick neck broke the leash.

The dog turned on the man and bared its teeth. The man dropped to his knees and put the dog’s head under his arm into a wrestling maneuver, a headlock. The dog struggled, but the man held tight. He man yanked down trying to break the dog’s neck, but the dog dragged him through the cordgrass into the water.

The video skipped.

A vertical white line ran through the screen, as if the tape had been spliced.

The water was still as glass except for a slight ripple at the center of the canal.

Another white line ran through the screen.

The man arose from the ripple in the water, as if on a hydraulic platform, and stood in the center of the canal. Ragged pieces of flesh hung from his face and hands and from the torn legs of his pants. His legs had grown thick and looked broken, as the shins now bent back, instead of forward, at the knee. He stumbled toward the bank and fell into the high cordgrass.

On his hands and knees, he stared up at the camera. His eyes glowed bright with a blinding white light and his face looked black and ragged. The dog was gone.

The video started again from the beginning.

The people in the corner remained silent, even as new viewers entered through the curtains. For at least that moment, we were all stunned believers. There was nothing to say.

We had all seen the creation of a werewolf.

I don’t believe the video was “found’” at all, of course. But the format, if not the footage, is irrefutable. The vertical white lines convince me, though, that the artist delicately manipulated the video.

I interviewed the artist, John Shielding, at CanalSpace, and he insisted the piece was certainly found and not fabricated.  His only part as an artist was as a “conduit for the piece to reach its audience.”  Mr. Shielding is not only being modest, but also a bit of an ass.  We’re used to this in New York, just not so close to the Gowanus Canal.

6.

Transcript of the undated digital audio diaries of Drew Stubbfield.

        

There’s a girl in the office. Her job is something menial. She assists someone, shuffles papers. It’s hard to tell, really.

In the morning, she sits at her computer with a tall travel mug of green tea, sipping through a slit in the plastic lid. She’s too old for this baby cup, but the whole city uses them, paranoid about spilling coffee on their neighbors in the subway. Most of those commuters would be infinitely improved by scalded hands and stained shirtfronts.

Ms. Morelli, her nameplate reads.  No one calls her this.  No one uses any name for her, not even a polite Miss.

The Development Assistant, a fat balding guy in his early 20s from Cincinnati, who is one pair of coke bottle aviators away from the portrait of a sex offender, stops at her desk every fifteen minutes. He hands her a stack of papers and follows her to the copy machine as she copies them.

His name is Pete, and while he waits for her, he crosses his arms over his chest so his shirttails begin to pull out from the waist of his pants. By the end of the day, he’s got a fat roll of shirt around his belly and wet armpits and a black spill of ink in his shirt pocket and, most importantly, a stack of photocopies on his desk.

He does this every day. He succeeds in getting a pretty girl to do his job for him. His cleaner does a good job, too. His shirts are always stainless and pressed in the mornings.  

The girl, Ms. Morelli, is more of a woman than a girl, of course, but until she rises above this menial job, until she becomes an ad exec, or at least marries one and carries his babies and rears them in a big house in Westchester County, everyone will think of her as a girl.

In the intervals between Pete’s stacks of papers, she enters data into spreadsheets for the accounting department. When she finishes her green tea, she drinks water from the cooler. She bites the lip of her foam cup to hold it up to her mouth when she must use both hands to type.

The other women in the office, and they all have earned the title “woman” with thirty years of professional drudgery, heavy busts and hips, they all ignore the girl. Even the receptionist, an unfashionable ogre of a woman from New Jersey, stands up tall with her tiny alligator pocketbook when the other women tromp through the reception area on the way out to lunch.

Watch the phones, okay she tells Ms. Morelli.

Ms. Morelli eats her sandwich at her desk, answering phones between bites. She sweeps the crumbs into the wax paper pouch she uses to pack the sandwich. The wax paper pouch, she knows, is so much nobler than the plastic baggie, so much more definite in its folds and wrinkles.

Despite this low position, there is something remarkable about the girl. Her hair, kept precisely pulled back into a bun invisibly tied over the soft groove of her neck, remains impeccable and almost plastic throughout the day. When she removes her gray tweed jacket and hangs it on her chair back, her shoulders remain relaxed and pert in her white shirt, even as she sits over a keyboard and a meaningless task.

When Pete or the other women in the office mistreat her, her face never shows a moment’s worth of hesitation or doubt.  Her manner of dress is meticulous and tasteful.

It’s remarkable how much you can observe by timing your visits to the lobby of any office at different times of the day, each day, for as little as two weeks. The life of the office, so regimented and scripted, becomes apparent and offers its secrets and rhythms to anyone interested. The machinery of administration is so reductively consuming, no one cares who’s waiting for the elevator. It’s all uninteresting.

This is how I see the girl.

Something about the fabric of Ms. Morelli’s clothing made me notice her. When I finally spoke to her, I asked her what her passion was. I wanted her to understand I cared nothing about her position in the company. She told me she studied textile design and then looked down at her shoes, a pair of tasteful brown flats.

I began to pursue something in her.

A circle of twelve green-shaded lamps hangs from the ceiling over her desk behind the receptionist’s booth in the entranceway to our offices on Madison Avenue. The light from the lamps projects through the shades, a flower of green petals on the ceiling. I pointed this out to her to get her to look up from her shoes after she told me she studied textiles.

I leaned over her desk and breathed in silently as she commented on the green flower on the ceiling. There was no scent but the clean wool of her tweed skirt. On a corner of her tidy desk sat a framed print from a fashion book I recognized. The book was called Take Ivy. Four young men arrayed in varying shades of casualness walking through an ivy league yard, upturned cuffs and unbuttoned collars, perfectly sloppy sweaters.

I suggested she use the green flower over her head as inspiration for a pattern.

She scoffed.

Instead of showing the approval I felt, I tapped on her desk with a rigid finger and walked away without saying anything more. Her reflection frowned in the glass doors of the lobby.

I’ve caused an emotion.

7.

From the editorial section of the February 16, 2006 edition of New York Press.

Here’s to Hysteria!

We at New York Press do not condone the mainstream media’s use of sensationalized stories of violence and debauchery to paint our city as a den of iniquity, a high class Sodom of the 21st century flocked with gays and prostitutes and drug users and deep-pocketed lushes.

We do, however, urge you to read our own independent and alternative but equally sensationalized stories of violence and debauchery! The Post may have the best headlines in the business, but we’ve got the best stories.

We’d like you, the reader, to help us cultivate a fetish for the strange and obscure, the forgotten monsters of our old damp city.

Rents have gone too high, the cost of a cup of coffee made unfathomable. New York, under King Rudy and Prince Bloomberg, has become a playground for the wealthy, the white-panted Italian tourist socialite, the tall successful Dutch novelist, the fat British banker who can afford to be lean and strong.

These taste-mongers seem immune to the seasonal stories of rapists or park muggers or trench-coated flashers in the Post and the Daily News.  They hardly bat an eye at the junior partner who kills his stripper girlfriend in his one-bedroom on the Upper East Side, or at the first-year Pace student who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, flying to his death, chasing after his marble journal filled with poems and sketches of child pornography.

With these interlopers in mind as our primary target, we ask you to help us scare the world with the gory details of our worst demons.

The city needs its gargoyles.

Gotham is nothing without its villains.

We don’t have the power to expose the excesses and the evil going down in the clouds above our city streets, in the boardrooms and executive suites. But, with a little thing called fear, we can make unendurable the long walk from the door of a towncar to the lobby of a Wall Street tower.

Every week, going forward, we’ll offer the brutal truth, the true horror of our sparkling city. Help us uncover the sleeping hysteria of our times and bring the new gentry to its knees. Plaster the walls of the city with our paper and smoke out the bloated termites from the rafters.

8.

Excerpt from Mark Alton’s notebook, subpoenaed by the NYPD and later serialized by the Post.

February 17, 2006

Marcus called last night, woke me up from a dream in which I worked at Two Boots Pizza on the Lower East Side. A group of kids from Chinatown kept coming in. Each of them would buy a pizza and slip it out of the box and walk out on to 1st Avenue and drop the pizza on top of the gutter.

After a while, the pizzas piled ten feet high and started melting, taking on a fleshy consistency. As pedestrians passed the mound of pizza, they became violently ill and threw up into the gutter. The city’s sewage system clogged and the streets flooded with vomit and mozzarella cheese and pizza sauce.

“Mark, you know what I was thinking?”  Marcus sounded like he just woke up. I heard the Dobermans sniffing and shifting in their dog beds in the background. “You and me we’re a lot alike. Even our names. Marcus. Mark. Mine’s just a fancy Latinization of your harsh ass Anglo-Saxon name.”

I asked Marcus what I could do for him. I tried to indicate, with my tone of voice, that I was in bed and it wasn’t cool to be calling so late.

“Latins. We always go a little overboard. Trick out our names just like we trick out anything they put wheels on. You see a rusty piece of shit old cruiser bike with high handle bars and a banana seat; we see a work of art waiting to happen. Puerto Rican dude’s gonna put tassels on those bars and sheep’s skin on the seat. Sparkle up a red white and blue paint job, shine up the chrome till it’ll blind you.”

“Brainby’s not Latin, Marcus.You probably shouldn’t be talking like you are.  People’ll think you’re racist.”

“Brainby’s my dad’s name. White stink Irish. But my mom she was a Puerto Rican looker. You know that Rolling Stones song? Miss You? There’s the line goes, We got some Puerto Rican girls just dying to meet you. That shit’s about my mom. She fucked Mick Jagger.”

“…”

“On the same record, there’s one called Some Girls. It’s all about the girls in New York City back in the ’70s, when my mom was coming up. You’ll notice they mention all sorts of bitches. French, Italian, English, black, Chinese. They don’t let a peep slip about Puerto Rican girls. They wanted to keep those bitches a secret. Good thing.”

I was not only surprised by Marcus’s knowledge of Stones lyrics, but also a little disgusted by how he spoke so freely about his mother’s sexual exploits. He spoke like she was dead. Sometimes men create goddesses out of their fallen mothers. Marcus created a whore.  Maybe Mick Jagger doomed him with an Oedipus complex.

I asked Marcus again why he was calling me so late.

“I don’t have many people who listen to what I say. You take notes. You listen.”

A Doberman whimpered and nuzzled up to the phone. I heard its foamy mouth snap after a yawn.

“One of my dogs disappeared. Left a puddle of blood and some tracks out to the sidewalk. Then the tracks vanish. Not another drop of blood. It’s like the street swallowed him up.”

I told Marcus to call the police.

“You got to help me. I can’t talk to the police.”

Somehow he convinced me to come out to his Gowanus warehouse to help him find his dog. He told me he’d pay for my cab ride out and if it made me feel more comfortable he’d pay to keep the cab idling on 5th Street while we looked for his dog and then he’d pay to get me back home again.

Marcus’s part of Brooklyn doesn’t get much pedestrian traffic even in the daytime. The most you’ll see is garbage men walking down from 4th Avenue bus stops and street guys, maybe homeless, pushing shopping carts full of twisted metal rods, radiators, pipe fittings salvaged from old buildings further south and central in Brooklyn, and the occasional gentrifying influence, a hipster priced out of Williamsburg or a brave country boy painter who can afford a loft down there to work in.

At night, the streets are ghostly silent and the yellow light from the tall lamps along 3rd Avenue only reaches a few feet down each street toward the canal, so there are corridors of deserted sidewalk and pavement through a black swathe of unknown darkness.

I knew we’d never find his dog.

“My friend, you can’t imagine how much I appreciate you coming here to help me,” Marcus said. He almost hugged me as I walked from the gypsy cab. When I backed away, he leaned in to the cab’s window and spoke soft Spanish in the driver’s face.

“He’s going to help us by driving down to the end of the street here so we can check along the canal. The headlights’ll help.”

Marcus’s breath steamed as he spoke.

I pushed the collar up on my coat and brought my scarf up to cover my face. Marcus wore only his training gear, the white jumpsuit and red oven mitt, but he did not seem to mind the cold.

“I can’t believe somebody’d do something to one of my dogs. Doesn’t make any sense. My crew’s hurt.”

We walked toward the canal. The town car followed behind us, the hollow sound of its wheels rolling slow over the cobbled street louder than Marcus’s strained voice.

“Never did anything to anybody. Never hurt nobody. I don’t even got anybody I could piss off, if I wanted to.”

He’d started pissing me off, but I held my tongue.

At the end of the street, Marcus pressed himself against the chain fence. He threaded the fingers of his bare hand through the links and pounded on a post with the oven-mitted hand.  

“Ruffy! Ruffy! Come here, Ruffy!  Your crew misses you.”

Beyond the fence, the cab’s headlights only showed a small patch of concrete with some dusty weeds growing up from the cracks. We only knew the canal was a few feet further on by the reflections in its rippling currents and the sound of moving water.

Where the fence met the brick wall of the building on the opposite side of the street from Marcus’s warehouse, the bottom links folded up from the pavement leaving a space big enough for a man, or a large dog, to crawl through.

I patted Marcus on the shoulder and pointed the opening out to him. I immediately regretted it. He waved for the cab driver to pull in closer and ducked under the fold and disappeared in the darkness on the other side of the fence.

I looked at the driver for sympathy, to confirm the craziness of this expedition, but he just laughed and shook his head and motioned for me to follow Marcus. Marcus must’ve promised him a lot of money.

As I crouched and crawled under the fold in the fence, something pulled back hard on my neck, choked me for a second. I pushed forward and tried to stand on the other side of the fence but the force on my shoulders kept me down.

When I turned around, I saw the driver with his head out the window of the town car, laughing at me. My scarf stuck in a jagged cut link of the fence. I unhooked it and stood up and ducked out of the path of the headlights and saw, from the banks of the canal, the whole world was only darkness and those two beams of white light and a glittering of reflection on the canal.

The water flowed faster than I expected.  The sparkling glints from its surface and the rushing sound of the current raced to the west.  If I fell in, or if Marcus fell in, we’d be pulled under the riptide immediately, buried in the thick sludge and chipped bedrock in the canal bed.  

This close to the sea, the water pushes hard through the land. You always read how polluted and disgusting the Gowanus is, you expect a cauldron of shit and city funk, gasoline fumes bubbling to the surface, three-eyed fish. But it smells fresh and briny. If I closed my eyes I might’ve fooled myself pretending I stood on some quiet beach in Maine, except the waves were just a constant rush.

“Marcus!” I’d begun shaking by now and forgot why we were out by the canal. “Where the hell’d you go?”

The water continued its never-ending race toward a fork to the north where it split and disappeared underground in two streams through culverts at 3rd Avenue and Butler Street.  

Marcus didn’t respond. I walked in the direction he’d gone when I stood on the other side of the fence.

“Marcus!”

I kept shouting, not thinking of what kind of people spent their nights along the canal, what kind of things they’d do to an intruder in a fine wool coat and scarf. I’d already forgotten the shock of the tug on my neck under the fence.

“Marcus!”

I walked past Marcus’s building, which filled the whole length of the block by the canal.  On the other end of the next street, I could see the pale yellow light from the tall lamps far away on 3rd Avenue.

As I stood looking at the small halo of warm light, wanting to turn back and sit in the car with the driver, a howl filled the space between the warehouses on this side of the canal and the tall concrete banks on the opposite side.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

The most generic cliché of fear turns out to be true.  

My professors at Columbia would’ve crucified me for writing it, but the damn hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I ran back toward the headlights which still spilled onto the weedy concrete patch.  Before I reached the other side of the warehouse, I tripped over something solid and warm huddled down on the ground.  Flipped on my back in a scattering of broken glass, I yelled out again.

“Marcus!”

He whimpered.  

“I’m here.”

I crawled in the direction of his sobbing, crushing bits of glass into the heels of my palms and my kneecaps.

“What’s wrong, Marcus? What’re you doing on the ground?”

He reached his hand out toward me and when he found my arm, he slid his hand down and grasped mine. He made me feel what was lying in front of him. The Doberman’s fur felt slick and cold.

“We’ve got to move him. You grab his back paws. I’ll grab the front.”

The dog didn’t breathe, didn’t whimper move or moan. But Marcus’s voice was urgent.

“Oh my god.”

Marcus cried out when he lifted the Doberman’s front paws. I’d got an easy grip on the rear, but I had to strain to lift the dead weight of such a big dog.

“What’s wrong, Marcus?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

We walked back toward the headlamps, the bulk of Ruffy swaying between us, making us step wide and slow. Marcus sobbed when the light started hitting us.

“My god!”  He dropped his end of the dog. “Not again.”

“Again? This happen before, Marcus?”

On the ground, at Marcus’s feet, the Doberman sprawled out, its snout cut cleanly from its face behind the teeth. A smooth hole beneath its eyes oozed blood and brown bile. I retched, dropped the dog and stepped back.

“Once before. Just after you did your story on me.”  

Marcus fell to his knees and lifted the dog’s front legs. The paws had also been cut from the body. Bones glistened white in the headlights at the end of each nub. The cuts were precise, not at all ragged.

“Same exact thing. They cut the snout and front paws off. What’s anybody want with a poor dog’s snout and paws?”

The cab driver got out of the town car, left the door open, let out all the heat. He walked to the fence and saw the dog’s body and cursed in Spanish.

Three puddles of blood formed on the concrete under Ruffy’s snout and two paws, glistening in the headlights. When my stomach settled, we carried the dog inside and Marcus told me all about it.

9.

Transcript of the undated digital audio diaries of Drew Stubbfield.

Mexican delivery boys see more in this town than anyone else. In the rain, they’re the only poor suckers with slickers on their backs on bicycles towing lo mein and pizzas in white bags.

Mexicans started working for white people here a long time ago, but now they work for everybody. The Chinese. The Italians. The Jews. The only people they won’t work for is the blacks. They’ve got some dignity.

They’re short and wide and always quiet, and look the same as the Mexicans who cut flowers under the awnings of corner bodegas and the Mexicans who work in the ceramic tile warehouses and live poultry storefronts in Sunset Park. When asked questions, they stare blankly ahead as if they do not understand English. When presented with money they develop easy math skills.

White women in the neighborhood feel guilty when Mexican delivery boys bring them food, especially from expensive restaurants along 5th Avenue. A hangar steak from Belleville becomes rubbery and dry after a half hour in a Styrofoam carton, but when a bored housewife waits one too many hours for her stockbroker husband to return from work, she doesn’t care about the quality of food.

The delivery boy’s delicate frown as he counts out her change at the doorjamb makes her press it all back into his palm. She’d fuck the boy and let him lounge naked on the plush couch for her husband to find when he came home, if the boy looked a bit more like me.

But I can’t enter his world and, fortunately for me, he can’t enter mine.

In the face of the swift technological progress of the last twenty years, the media has created a mass hysteria for privacy, while at the same time breaking down the traditional walls protecting individuals.

Every pundit quotes Orwell.

Every American liberal with his nose in Harper’s magazine decries the ubiquitous security cameras of Great Britain as an army heralding an imminent police state.

Yet the media, by and large, encourages a frenzy of openness unrivaled since before the middle of the 20th century. Not since America moved into subdivisions and flicked on a hundred million television sets have its citizens waved their personal information so brazenly about.

But there’s been a disappearance, as well, of the man on the street. The authorities assume we’re all plugged in. They imagine anyone worth monitoring pushes every dirty thought and vile need through wires and cables. The poorest student can afford an hour at an internet café.

But what about the man who does not leave a trace in the ether? The man who keeps his thoughts secure, who locks his sins in his apartment, under his pillow, or in the bank, in a safe deposit box?

The closest thing to the old man on the street, the private detective, the Pinkerton thug, the extinct newspaperman, is the Mexican delivery boy. A man slips into an alley with a woman, or disappears through the trees at the edge of the park with her, and he is not seen by a sleepy doorman, or by the teenagers smoking cigarettes under the marquee at the cinema.  He is seen by the Mexican delivery boy on his bicycle.

I must exercise caution.

10.

A featured article in the February 14, 2006 edition of New York Press.

Our Friend the Fiend by Faith Howard

What turns a common criminal into a fiend?

The phrenologists of the 19th century developed a system in which one could determine a person’s proclivity towards antisocial behavior by examining the shape of the subject’s head. A sloping forehead and a pronounced brow ridge indicated the lowest form of deviant, the common thug. Close set eyes tended to signify untrustworthiness. A small frontal region of the cranium, respective to the rear of the skull, suggested the most worrisome of personalities, the immoral sexual deviant.

However, an important set of criminals, the psychopaths, the serial killers and mass murderers, never, even in the annals of a pseudoscience like phrenology, share physical indicators. Most of these fiends have perfectly shaped heads. Furthermore, many are handsome and charismatic, even photogenic.

So, when you see a mug shot of Ted Bundy, there is no sense of abnormality. To look into his face is to see the ideal form of man. This is not to suggest all psychopaths are physically attractive, but only to posit all psychopaths look like you and me and your neighbor on the bus as you read this article.

The Post has given fanfare to a series of killings in south Brooklyn, all committed with the same bravura precision. They’ve named the killer The Fiend.

We’ll not argue with this moniker, but instead reserve judgment as to whether these three murders are the work of one Fiend or rather the result of a general Fiendishness on the rise in the city.

For those Times readers (who also deign to read the Press) too snobbish to pick up the Post or Daily News, we present a recapitulation of each slaying. We’d also like to remind you, our tabloid paper fits neatly within the fold of the Sunday Book Review, so Monday morning you won’t have to worry about the fellows at the office deriding your reading material!

Victim # 1 – Rebecca Farnsworth

On October 17 of last year, Pastor Robert Litchfield of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights called an animal control office to report a strange smell coming from the vents in the crawlspace above his rectory office. He’d asked the groundskeeper of the church to check the attic. The groundskeeper reported seeing nothing but old boxes of papers and a few broken church pews. Pastor Litchfield, not trusting the nearly 80-year-old groundskeeper, insisted something must be rotting above their heads.

Pat Lombardi from Kings County Animal Control arrived at the church late in the afternoon and inspected the attic. He confirmed the groundskeeper’s report, but agreed with Pastor Litchfield about the smell. Lombardi compared the stench to the scent of the rotten bits of beef he cleaned out of the drainage system in the floor of his father’s butcher shop as a kid in Bay Ridge.

“Like death itself.  It pulls your stomach right up into your throat.”

Lombardi, a Brooklyn Italian stereotype, who wears flowered shirts over his big belly and keeps his dark hair slicked back, appeared on Gotham’s Guardians a late night interview show on public television. He told the host, Martin Janowsky, a red-bereted Curtis Sliwa disciple, what he found when he climbed a fire escape to the roof of the rectory.

“So I go up to the roof of the church building. Lucky for me it’s no Catholic church. It’s got these real gradual sloping roofs, almost flat, so you can walk easy without losing your balance. If it was any steeper I mighta fallen right off and broke my head on the sidewalk. What I seen was indescribable. Something straight out of hell.  

“In my profession, you tend to get a strong stomach. I’m used to pulling pigeon guts out of ventilation fans. I’ve bagged housecats electrocuted and charred completely black from chewing on wires, a whole pile of rotten rats starved locked in an airtight elevator shaft. When I was a kid I rendered pig carcasses. There’s nothing worse than a face full of pork blood and a mouth load of squirting lard.

“Look, I’ve done jobs in Bushwick and East New York back in the ’80s. Dealt with the police plenty of times. Saw a pair of forearms, black forearms, cauterized at the elbow cut so there was no blood, twisted and tied up in one of those old TV antennas. They’d left the fingertips intact, so the victim could be identified. Ended up being the grandson of a lady in the building.

“But this was unexpected. It’s a good neighborhood over there in Brooklyn Heights. You want to buy a brownstone on the block you got to be a multi-millionaire. No question. But this was the most horrifying shit I ever seen.

“When you render a hog, the skin stays on. Keeps the fat and the moisture in until each cut is prepared for sale. I once skinned a pig before it was ready for sale and my dad kicked the shit out of me, I wasted so much money. For other animals you got to pull the skin off far ahead of time. Cattle always come to a butcher skinned. Deer gets skinned. Probably all game meat does. We don’t get much venison or rabbit in Bay Ridge.

“But when I saw the woman’s body up there on the church roof, I lost my nerve. I tripped back and almost fell. Lucky they got strong aluminum gutters hooked up with steel clasps, cause I stepped on one and it bent down a good six inches. But it held. Otherwise, they’d be scraping my brains off the sidewalk.

“Her skin was pulled back, like you’d pull back a deer’s skin. There were slits up from her ankles, which looked like they’d been chewed up, and the skin up her whole body was split in four strips and pulled up all the way to her neck. It curled up around her head, so I didn’t see her face.  Couldn’t even tell it was a woman.”

The woman Lombardi found on the roof of Plymouth Church was 53-year-old Rebecca Farnsworth. She’d been missing for seven days. The maid service for her Upper East Side duplex apartment reported her absence for three consecutive days. Farnsworth, the regular maid said, hated to have anyone in her apartment when she was not present. Yet, the door remained unlocked.

Farnsworth worked as an intellectual property lawyer for twenty-five years before retiring at age 50. She’d been in the news briefly, when she divorced her husband, the heir of a condiment fortune, in 1996. She claimed to be uncomfortable with and morally compromised by her husband’s obsession with binding and sadomasochism.

For a week, at Farnsworth’s discretion, the Post held a set of embarrassing photographs of her husband for ransom. Her divorce settlement came forthwith and she dropped out of the public eye. She’d been spotted by an undercover paparazzo one evening with a younger man at a table at the Carlisle Hotel’s café enjoying one of Bobby Short’s last sets before he died.

She is survived by two children, who were both unable to make it to New York to identify her remains. The maid confirmed Farnsworth’s identity. This was corroborated by dental records at a later date.

The coroner found evidence of sexual activity on Farnsworth’s corpse, but the autopsy did not indicate rape and no semen was found on her body. A series of deep tissue bruises on the top flange of her foot led the coroner to believe Farnsworth may have been alive for at least a portion of her skinning. None of Farnsworth’s personal effects were left at the scene of the crime.

There are no leads in her murder case.

Victim # 2 – Patricia Henning

Almost exactly a month later, on November 15, a high school intern at the Brooklyn Museum whose name has been withheld from the media to protect his identity, loaded up a large canvas laundry cart with marionette puppets from the basement of the museum building on Eastern Parkway. He pushed the cart past the gated eastern entrance to the Botanic Gardens and the huge Egyptian temple façade of the main branch of the Brooklyn Library.

Stopping for a hot cocoa at the entrance to Prospect Park, he chatted with a Pakistani street vendor. The vendor later said the intern exhibited a strange commitment to pedestrianism in Brooklyn.

“He said he dreamed of a time that never was, before the streets around the plaza roared with traffic and stunk with the fumes from so many automobiles. ‘Bury the roads’ he said.  ‘Put them under the ground in tunnels and you’d make this park a pride of the city. It’d be enough to break Brooklyn free from New York, as it once was.’  Personally, I think the boy is crazy, starting revolutions in his head. This is dangerous thought. Or he is lazy and just trying to waste the time and money of his employer.”

After finishing his hot cocoa, the intern crossed the first three lanes of traffic in the circle around Grand Army Plaza. He stopped and waved back to the vendor and shrugged his shoulders.

“He hates cars, this boy. I don’t understand young people in America. They want to change the universe, but won’t do a day’s worth of hard work.”

The intern then crossed the next set of six lanes of traffic and brought his laundry cart under the lavish Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, a monument at the edge of the park, topped with a huge bronze Columbia in her chariot looking eastward. He walked under the arch to a large bolted copper door under the relief statue of Ulysses S. Grant on horseback.

The interior chamber of one side of the arch serves as storage and a drop off point for the museum’s collection of puppets which are often rented out to theaters in the city.

It’s strange, but true.  

The intern pulled his cart up to the opened copper door and began unloading the marionettes from the cart onto a storage rack ringing two metal ladders far up into the arch. The puppets hung on wooden spikes on the rack. The intern slid each puppet’s torso over a separate spike, working from the ground up.

When he brought the last puppet up to its spot on the rack, he recoiled at a drop of blood as it hit his forehead. He flinched and stared up and dropped down from the ladder to the ground at the sight of a woman impaled on one of the spikes.

All the while he’d taken the body for another puppet.

The vendor ran to the arch and called for help on his cell phone.

“I knew the boy was still alive because I saw his breath coming out. It was a cold day.”

The intern woke up on the concrete and flinched when he turned on his side to get the pressure off his throbbing head and saw Lincoln’s mounted statue across from Grant.

The vendor told a reporter, “The boy said there was a dead body up inside the arch. A lady. Somebody played a horrible joke on him. But it was real, so not very funny. When I stepped inside the doorway and looked up I felt the blood drip down on my face. But it was as if the blood had only then started flowing. There was no puddle on the ground, only a few drops.”

The woman on the puppet rack was 57-year-old Patricia Henning, a successful fashion designer who owned a chain of downtown boutiques. Five years ago, Henning became embroiled in a media scandal when her longtime personal assistant Anita Hayes brought charges of abuse against her.

Hayes claimed Henning would berate her with racial epithets and other disparaging language. On multiple occasions, Hayes told the Daily News, Henning beat her across the back with a leather dominatrix whip for imaginary indiscretions, and once threw a heavy old-fashioned fabric iron at Hayes, fracturing her kneecap.

Medical reports at the time seemed to confirm Hayes’s claims, but Henning denied all the charges, and was quoted in a famous Daily News story as saying, “Doesn’t prove a thing. I don’t know what that depraved bitch does in her spare time.”

The Post and the Daily News ran pictures of Hayes crying, detailed annotated photographs of the striated scars on her back, and every day, featured a new spread of Henning exiting her SoHo apartment, impeccably dressed but otherwise haggard and drawn. The black bags under her eyes became iconic for a few weeks, the signs of a queen bitch dying. That summer, rambunctious party girls and fag hags in Chelsea started drawing the dark circles in under their own eyes to give themselves an unapproachable look. We called it “cockblocker warpaint.”

Henning never married, and as she rocketed to international fame in the fashion world in the mid-1970s, rumors of her being a lesbian circulated in both the glossy press and tabloid pulps. She never publicly commented on this gossip, but remained a devoted socialite and showed up at the best fashion parties with the youngest, hottest men throughout her period of greatest success. In 1978 she adopted her first child from Bangladesh, and over the next five years adopted two more children from different parts of Asia.

By the early ’90s she’d fallen out of favor in the fashion world for her unchanging stark   designs, and over the last twenty years of her life she focused her energies on her two boutiques she owned in Lower Manhattan.

The media frenzy over Anita Hayes’s allegations estranged her children, who remarkably sided with Hayes at the first deposition before Henning settled out of court.

The coroner found, as with Farnsworth’s body, signs of unforced sexual conduct, but no semen on Henning’s corpse. Her feet and hands had been chewed up, and her jaw raggedly slashed away from her face. She looked enough like a puppet for the first responders to the scene at Grand Army Plaza to misidentify the body in the dimly lit storage area and start climbing up the wrong ladder.  The police explained the strange delay in the bleeding as a result of the change in temperature and humidity when the intern opened the door at the arch. Henning’s body hung on the rack for at least three days before the intern discovered it.

Identification of the victim in this case was a bit trickier.

The Pakistani street vendor recognized Henning’s face, and in his interview with detectives at the scene of the crime he called her “the crazy old white woman who beat her worker like a slave.” He’d remembered the stories from the papers five years before.

“I read the Post every morning on the train from Queens. Some of these things stick in your mind. She seemed like a horrible person. Not that she’d deserve this.”

Henning’s three children could not be reached to confirm her identity, so in a most ironic twist of fate, Anita Hayes was summoned to the coroner’s office to identify the body of her former employer.

There are no leads in Henning’s murder case.

Victim # 3 – Towanda Willis

On December 2, an anonymous tip led police to an empty gravel lot in Red Hook where they found a body bound and gagged in a corner of the fenced grounds overgrown with ivy. The body was identified as Towanda Willis by her family after a gruesome photo circulated in the Post. Willis, a prostitute who worked the streets of Hunt’s Point and sent money home to her family in Fort Green, had been reported missing two weeks prior.

The police linked this case with the other two because Willis’s hands and feet, her lips and the skin under her collar bone had similar teeth marks to the other two bodies.  Again, the coroner found signs of sexual conduct, and in this case, extracted semen from the body.  The police have found no matches in their criminal databases for genetic material extracted from the scene.

Willis’s family insists Isaac Smailis, her estranged pimp, is responsible for her death.  The police have not followed up on this lead. There are no other leads in Willis’s murder case.

*

According to the Post, the NYPD is developing a psychological profile for a single killer who committed all three murders. They’ve conducted thorough interviews with street vendors, delivery boys, public employees and residents near the three locations where each body was found.

So far, no one has come forward with any helpful information.

The amateur criminal pathologists here at New York Press, namely my editor and I, would like to suggest two possible explanations for this string of brutal crimes in such close proximity to one another in the otherwise safe neighborhoods of south Brooklyn.

The Towanda Willis murder does not fit the modus operandi indicated by the other two killings. She was a low profile hooker who, according to her family, had an angry pimp after her for money. The murderer left semen on her body. The display of her corpse, a simple binding and gagging, has none of the exuberance of the Farnsworth and Henning displays.

Let’s call victim # 3 an unfortunate, but all too common, casualty of our city’s never-ending supply of organized vice and the police department’s, not to mention Congress’s, unwillingness to protect our women of the night.

Our first suggestion, concerning the other two murders, is the Post might be right.

We might be dealing with a Fiend, a killer with such cunning and precision he leaves no trace at all at the scenes of two high profile murders and transports two horrifically mutilated bodies to two heavily trafficked public places without being detected by a single witness.

New York hasn’t seen such an enthusiastic killer in two decades. Furthermore, The Fiend might be female. This would explain the lack of semen. Though neither victim was a known lesbian or bisexual, the rumors of Henning’s homosexuality may have been true, and Farnsworth could have been so disgusted by her ex-husband’s deviance, she forsook leather-clad men for beflanneled women (snicker).

Our second suggestion, and one we delight in equally as the first, is the murders were committed by two individuals with obvious motives in each case.

Farnsworth’s ex-husband never got over the fact Rebecca held photographs of him in full-on gimp costume for ransom and extorted a fortune from him in the plain view of the public.  His imagination, groomed by years of BSDM parties, wouldn’t be below creating such a monstrous end for his ex-wife.

Anita Hayes, on the other hand, would’ve been angry to only have received money from her malefactor. Henning quickly dropped out of the public eye, but not more than two years after settlement, her boutiques were featured in a much-read Times article about the essence of the city’s fashion culture. The article mentioned nothing about Hayes’s accusations. Hayes must have been furious. Her years as an assistant to Henning prepared her for one final dark project.

We’re not accusing anyone of murder, just saying neither of these women lacked for enemies.

Needless to say, I think most of our readers are safe in either case.

The Fiend’s not going to bother with your average girl in her studio apartment in Prospect Heights, and if Mr. Farnsworth and Anita Hayes are responsible they’ll get theirs in time.

But The Fiend will be our champion if he exists and continues to scare the hell out of our city’s abundance of high class live-in tourists by targeting rich bitches like Farnsworth and Henning. We just hope he sets his sights a little lower, perhaps on the unknown executive in gabardine slacks and the talentless beat poet heiress in linen pants.

We’re especially sick of those two stereotypes stealing our cabs.

11.

From the Daily News column New in Review in the weekly Television supplement of the February 1, 2003 edition.

Most public television talk shows maintain a dated look and approach to the interview medium.  Charlie Rose’s wide lapels and the plain oak table he holds court at have become a touchstone for serious talk television.

Other, more elaborate, mainstays of the format include the syndicated McLaughlin Report, which manages to spice things up by removing the table altogether and involving the guests, an almost never-changing cadre of rich liberal and richer conservative pundits, in a ranking game of such imbecilic proportions it’s almost beyond satire.

A recent favorite of the editorial staff here at the Daily News is, “On a scale from 9 to 11, 9 being absolute impossibility and 11 being utter certainty, was Saddam Hussein responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?”

The show is nearly saved by John McLaughlin’s jowly reply to everyone’s answer.

“Wrong!”

The new late-night NY1 show, Gotham’s Guardians, breaks all of these conventions without straying too far into the hysteria-ridden territory of the 24-hour news network talk show. The host Martin Janowsky, a good friend and follower of Curtis Sliwa, wears his Guardian Angel gear, a red silk jacket and matching felt beret, proudly. The way he leans on his forearm over his black desk brings to mind, for viewers of a certain age, the swagger of Popeye flexing his muscles at Brutus, protecting Olive Oil and the rest of the world from evil.

New York thirsts for the stone-faced non-partisan surety Janowsky brings to his show every night. When he gets heated about an issue, he unbuttons his silk jacket and shows a little patch of chest hair peaking from his tough-guy white t-shirt underneath. By the end of the segment, though, he always buttons back up and straightens his beret and apologizes for upsetting a guest or a portion of his audience. He never uses his pulpit for demagoguery the way Billy O’Reilly and Chris Matthews do.

Janowsky’s show maintains a strictly local context, which these days, nonetheless, seems to encompass a global conflict spanning the ages. His guests are often policemen and firefighters, occasionally a doctor or non-profit executive serving the disadvantaged in our metropolis.

Every Tuesday he devotes his entire show to a single survivor of the 9/11 attacks.  However, his show never devolves into the sob-story outrage of Nancy Grace. Janowsky manages to wrangle concrete public safety advice from community leaders, clergy and law enforcement professionals.

Most of our pundits remind us constantly of the terror alert level, which produces nothing more than a color-coded mixture of ignorant chaos and naïve complacency. Janowsky instead, gives his viewers important advice on how to protect themselves on a day-to-day basis in a world abounding with real and imaginary monsters. His local crime coverage beats all of the major networks.

Gotham’s Guardians is a must-watch show for all concerned, rational citizens.

12.

Transcript from the March 1, 2006 episode of Gotham’s Guardians.

Janowsky.  Welcome to Gotham’s Guardians, ladies and gentlemen. As usual, tonight, we’re ready to break open an important public safety story that’s been neglected by the NYPD and other city organizations and completely ignored by the mayor’s administration. Last week, after a three month hiatus, The Fiend struck again in one of Brooklyn’s safest residential areas.  

An as yet unidentified white female, approximately 45 to 50-years-old was found strung up on the Pavilion Theater’s marquee at Prospect Park West and 14th Street. Completely nude, her hands and feet were skinned and stripped of the flesh down to bare bones. A thick gauge hemp rope was used to string her up by the wrists and ankles.

Young mothers and their children arrived for a Saturday morning matinee before any management at the cinema noticed the body. The NYPD has indicated they are considering this murder linked to the three similar killings in south Brooklyn spread out over the last three months of last year.

That’s all fine and good for the NYPD. But me and the Guardian Angels and the concerned citizens out there who have to walk the streets and sit on the subways and buses every day of their lives don’t think developing a psychological profile of a serial killer should take half a year. If this goes on too much longer we might all have to take matters into our own hands and find this murderer ourselves.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to open one full-hour show per week to your telephone calls.  Please phone in with your tips, evidence, or even theories about who The Fiend might be and what the NYPD should be doing to find him.

I’m going to ask you all to withhold proper names from your commentary when you call in. We don’t want to turn our show into the Salem Witch Trials. All calls will be screened by the producers here at Gotham’s Guardians, so please think out your comments well in advance before calling in.

Get your facts straight, people.

I’m going to give you all a week to brainstorm and take notes. If we all keep an eye out on our own street corners, on the comings and goings on each of our blocks, then one of us is going to see something.

Until The Fiend is apprehended, we owe it to the city we love to be vigilant in protecting ourselves and our fellow citizens from this ruthless killer.

Tonight, Jesus from Sunset Heights joins us via telephone.

His name has been changed and his voice altered to protect his identity. As with so many other folks out in Sunset Heights, Jesus isn’t a legal resident of our country. I know I’ve railed against illegal aliens in the past, but sometimes it’s vital to forgive a small sin of necessity for a brave deed of civic conscience.

I know many so-called patriots who’d never share what Jesus is about to tell us.

You there, Jesus?

Jesus.  Yes.  I am here.

Janowsky.  Alright, Jesus. My producers tell me you’ve seen someone, or maybe I should say something, you believe to be the serial killer we’ve come to know as The Fiend. Can you please tell us where you were when you saw him?

Jesus.  Yes, I can tell. I work as deliverer for pizza restaurant on 3rd Avenue. My boss tells me to say it’s the best pizza in all of New York City. Villa Mia Pizza. Number one best, he says.

Janowsky.  Okay, Jesus. We’re not giving your boss free ad time here. What were you doing when you saw The Fiend?

Jesus.  It was dark. Very late at night, when many people are sleeping. The night before they found the lady, the lady crucified on the movie theater. I was bringing pizza to a 14th street customer. They live in very nice houses there and they order many, many pizzas for their children. You could feed a whole village with what one family eats.

Janowsky.  Maybe where you’re from, Jesus. But we Americans got big appetites. So, how’d you see The Fiend and what makes you think it’s him?

Jesus.  It’s not a man. I have told you before. It’s a beast. I stood on the stoop at the big house, after delivering the pizza, looking down at the street. I thought to myself how wonderful this street is. It’s quiet with big trees growing from wide sidewalks. It’s a place I could never live. Then, when I am thinking like this, almost as if in a dream, a huge shape comes running from the direction of the theater. It’s running like a man, a very large man with a big black hood over his head.

Janowsky.  Jesus, did you see the face of the man?

Jesus.  I tell you again, it’s not a man. It only runs like a man. When it comes past the stoop, it stops and turns. The hood covers its face, but its legs are bare and they are hairy and bent backward like a dog. The hands are not the hands of a man. They are claws, sharp and shining in the streetlight. It pulled back the hood and underneath was a wolf’s head. It howled and I froze in fear. The monster seemed angry. When I dropped to the ground, it ran off down the street, in the direction of 8th Avenue.

Janowsky.  Let me get this straight, Jesus. You’re telling us The Fiend is a werewolf? A mythic monster, dreamed up in fairy tales?

Jesus.  It’s not fairy tales. It’s very real. The people at the house I bring the pizza to, they came out after a while and told me I have to go from their stoop or they’ll call the police.  When I rode my bicycle back to 3rd Avenue, I took the long way, stayed near the park, because I didn’t want to be anywhere close to the monster.

Janowsky.  So you rode past the Pavilion Theater, Jesus? Did you see the woman they found on the marquee the following morning?

Jesus.  No, I was looking only close to the ground for the monster in the hood to come after me.

Janowsky.  Sorry, Jesus. All that proves to me is you were scared out of your mind. I don’t blame you much, seeing these horrible murders over the last six months in the area where you work. One thing I’ve learned, Jesus. You don’t always remember things the way they really happened when fear takes over.

In any case, thanks for telling us your story, Jesus. Who the hell knows? Maybe in the next few weeks we’ll get a slew of calls from people who’ve seen your werewolf. Maybe the killer is a man in a costume. If it is, we’ll give you credit as the one who shared the first real tip to the identity of The Fiend.

In all likelihood, you’ll have been deported by then. I don’t think they get Gotham’s Guardians down in Puebla.

So, without further ado, we must part. Thanks again, Jesus.