The Killing Kind by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online

sections of what appeared to be unburned skin exposed. The vaginal area was visible and unburned. One breast was exposed. A leg was burned at the foot and thigh. The entire neck and shoulders and head were charred and red, some melted completely. It wasn’t clear if the mannequin’s clothing made the blackened, melted mess all over it, or it was from the mannequin’s plastic flesh, but it had definitely been wrapped in a blanket at some point.
    Kat never mentioned seeing this, but the feet of the “mannequin” were bound with some type of copper wire or cord, the plastic outer coat burned away.
    “Someone set a mannequin on fire,” Kat yelled up to Linda. “That’s what it looks like.”
    To be sure, Kat walked up to the torso section of the mannequin—which was red and burned, but still very much intact. Then she touched it.
    “I wanted to make sure. . . .”
    She poked at it like rising dough.
    And that was when Kat knew right away that it wasn’t a mannequin, after all.
    “Call 911!” Kat yelled.
    “What?” Linda said.
    “It’s a body.”
    When she touched it, Kat was certain it was a real woman because, she later said, “it felt like human flesh.”

CHAPTER 13
    C aptain of the YCSO Detective Division (DD), Jerry Hoffman, along with several officers, raced toward a SWAT call when dispatch radioed to tell Hoffman that the emergency situation had been resolved.
    This was a good thing. Anytime cops disengaged from what could be a volatile and potentially violent scene, there is a fleeting moment of celebration.
    A moment later, however, dispatch called back, indicating the celebration on this day would be short-lived.
    “Go ahead . . . ,” Hoffman said.
    “There’s a body been found out on Apple Road.”
    Hoffman hit his lights and headed toward the park, arriving at 12:25 P.M. , just over ten minutes after the 911call from Linda and Kat had been made.
    There were two patrol officers on scene when Hoffman pulled up. The first thing that struck the investigator as he drove up to the scene was how secluded the area was where the body had been found.
    “This is a very rural area,” Hoffman said. “There is only one residence on it that I know of. It runs through the state park, and the area . . . It’s a pretty isolated area. . . .”
    In other words, a good place to burn and dispose of a body.
    As Hoffman got out of his vehicle and walked up to the body, one of his officers said, “I think it might be a mannequin, Captain.”
    “Like somebody pulling a prank or something?”
    “Yeah.”
    The scene had a surreal vibe to it. The body, if one didn’t know any better, seemed as though it could be a mannequin. Kat had thought so.
    Hoffman approached the body, getting himself close enough, he said, “to see, like, a ridge detail on the bottom of the foot.”
    Staring at it, Hoffman knew then that “it was, indeed, a person.”
    Mannequins don’t have that type of feature.
    The captain told his officers to get some crime scene tape up around the area and watch it closely. He didn’t want anyone unassociated with the investigation to enter the scene and possibly contaminate it. Just because a body had been burned, it did not mean there wasn’t trace evidence and possibly DNA left behind.
    Hoffman noted that whoever placed the woman here had bound her legs together with some type of wire or cord. To Hoffman, this meant they were looking at the potential cover-up of a violent murder.
    When members of the DD realized they had a second body found in a wooded area within a few weeks’ time, alarm bells went off that they might be looking at a serial killer working in the area. Here were two dead females; each was found under similar circumstances, about ten miles apart (depending on which way you drove); both areas were just below the North Carolina border; both victims obviously were murdered in one location and dumped in a second.
    Not to mention, with a second female having been burned the way she