Leaving the doctor’s office, Friedman said she had some shopping to do. First Friedman, who was redecorating her suburban Philadelphia home, went to All-in-One Linens to inquire about bedroom curtains. Then it was on to Toys“R”Us to look for a stroller for her brother’s newborn son, a gift for the child’s bris. Unable to find the special stroller, she called her brother at about 1 P.M., and he suggested she go to Cramer’s Juvenile Furniture on Frankford Avenue, which was advertising the stroller. She bought it with a credit card, and asked a clerk to help carry it to the trunk of her car. The store clerk watched her drive away at 3:30 P.M.

When she didn’t return home by 4:15, her husband, hematologist Dr. Alan Friedman, was worried. Donna was always punctual and knew she had to be home to relieve the babysitter for Scott, eight, and Lee, four. The couple also planned to attend a 6 P.M. birthday party for Dr. Friedman’s grandmother at a local restaurant. When his wife didn’t show up for the party, Dr. Friedman called hospitals and the police.

Police began an urgent search for the missing woman. Dr. Friedman spent two days retracing his wife’s steps. At 8:25 P.M., Thursday, police found the family’s 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass parked on Ogontz Avenue, a few blocks from the Cheltenham Square Mall. Blood was seeping out of the trunk. Friedman and her unborn child were both found dead in the trunk. The young mother had been bludgeoned to death with two blows to the skull, then shot twice in the back of the head, “for good measure,” the police said.

Fleisher choked up listening to Philadelphia Police Department detective Frank Diegel describe the case. Fleisher had grown up not far from the Friedmans. At the funeral service for mother and unborn child, people wept and cried out in anguish. The rabbi had told the story of a man who cried over the death of a loved one.

“Why do you weep?” the man’s friend asked. “Your tears will not bring back your loved one.”

“That is why I weep,” the man replied.

A week after the murders, the Philadelphia Daily News offered $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for the murder of Donna Friedman and her unborn child.” Family and friends of the Friedmans offered a separate $10,000 reward. Homicide detective Diegel had a primary suspect, but the police investigation foundered. The money was never collected. No one was ever arrested for the crime.

The Vidocq Society discussion was spirited. The society helped focus and reenergize Diegel on his primary suspect, whom VSMs were convinced had killed the pregnant woman. But in the weeks that followed, Fleisher was deeply frustrated. “We know who did it, but it was never pursued by the police. It was stonewalled, and we don’t know why.”

Fleisher said they were taking on a Sisyphean task if they tried to solve cold murders. Police often interviewed the killer within forty-eight hours of a murder, but if they didn’t recognize him, the case dried up fast. Memories faded. Evidence disappeared. Other cases clamored for attention. Once a case officially went cold, the difficult turned nearly impossible. “There are good reasons a case doesn’t get solved in the first place,” Fleisher said. “You have to deal with those.” It took a highly motivated DA and police department, and often a passionately involved family, to blast a case from the ice. On top of all that, the Vidocq Society lacked police power to arrest and subpoena. Their power was brainpower. “We almost always know who did it,” Fleisher said. “But to find a solution, get an arrest and conviction, the stars would have to be aligned.”

Gill, the high-ranking Treasury agent, left the Friedman case with a humbling lesson. While he was busy chasing Mafia kingpins, “A lot of people in this country get away with murder. A lot more than I thought.” A restless mood seemed to grip the VSMs. Was the point of the exclusive club to expose difficult truths and break hearts? It wasn’t at all what Fleisher intended.

Yet to Fleisher’s surprise, the Vidocq Society grew quickly and dramatically, and just as quickly gained a remarkable reputation in and out of law enforcement. By the fifth meeting, on April 18, 1991, the size of the society had more than doubled to sixty-two members. The buzz about the dining and detective club reached the media. A New York Times reporter had asked to attend the fifth ratiocinative luncheon. The Vidocq Society, he later wrote, “may be the only club in which real sleuths try to solve real crimes for recreation.”

The new VSMs were, if anything, even more prominent. The director of Brigade de la Sûreté, the French equivalent of the FBI founded by Vidocq in 1811, signed on, making the trip to Philadelphia from Paris. So did FBI agent Daniel Reilly, an organized crime expert from Long Island. Agent Reilly wanted to relax from his job of tracking “really horrible, no, make that repugnant people.”

New VSM Charles Rogovin, a Temple University law professor and criminologist, knew something about cold cases. He sat on the select congressional committees that investigated the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Yet he was now eager to help the everyday cop “who’s got a tough nut to crack. An old case is very tough to deal with.” The virtue of the Vidocq Society, he believed, was that “if the assigned investigator is working as hard as he can and he runs out of trump, sometimes it takes an outside investigator to say, ‘How about this?’ ”

Rogovin looked around the room proudly at the record turnout for the fifth meeting. “This is not a collection of English club members,” he said. “You’ve got some seasoned people here.”

Cuisine and crime that day would be served at the Dickens Inn, a small colonial tavern, built in 1788, facing the broad cobblestone boulevard of South Second Street. The society had left the Naval Officers’ Club, finding it insufficiently atmospheric for their deliberations, in addition to which some VSMs voiced concern about privacy. The new digs were an intimate English pub named in homage to Charles Dickens, who actually visited Philadelphia. The Times reporter was taken by the irony of the setting, noting “waitresses dressed in eighteenth-century barmaid uniforms brushed past a detective who remarked, ‘She was shot to death on a Sunday.’ ”

Fleisher was excited. The setting matched his vision for the Vidocq Society, and so did the case. He had finally scheduled a classic murder case that detectives could discuss and debate over a leisurely repast. It was the 1930s Butcher of Cleveland, who had committed the ghastliest series of murders in American history. The Butcher tortured, dismembered, decapitated, and drained the blood from more than thirty men and women from the 1920s through the Great Depression and beyond. Seventy years later, the murders, which had stumped hundreds of lawmen including Eliot Ness, remained unsolved.

Ness had been hired as Cleveland ’s safety director in 1935 with a shining reputation. In Chicago in 1931, the dashing young U.S. Treasury agent headed an elite unit of eight federal prohibition G-Men (Government Men) who raided Al Capone’s speakeasies and helped bring down the gangster on tax evasion and liquor charges. Men of unassailable integrity, Ness and his Chicago feds could not be bought-thus they were “The Untouchables.”

By all accounts, he made great strides cleaning up a corrupt city. He attacked gambling and the city’s organized crime operations, going after crooked police and politicians who were in the mob’s pocket. He dropped the crime rate 30 percent to make Cleveland the nation’s safest city. Ahead of his time, he reduced auto deaths by cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers. He even dropped juvenile crime two-thirds by starting citywide Boy Scout troops.