Seven years later, no one had been arrested for the murder, and Vidocq Society Members had assembled from London, Paris, New York, and Virginia to examine their ninth murder case, the Death of Deborah Wilson.

Philadelphia police sergeant Robert Snyder, a homicide detective in his forties with sandy hair and intense blue eyes, took the podium. The highly respected detective had worked the case for much of seven years; Snyder worked headline cases. But this one stumped him. “You always feel bad about the cases you don’t solve,” he told the society. “Especially the ones involving the young, the innocent, and the aged. This is one of the innocents.”

Walter, putting down his coffee, snapped to attention and looked up. He saw at once why no arrests had been made after seven years, and why police detectives and a private eye hired by the family were still confused. The murder scene contained no signs of the common motivations cops were trained to observe-no obvious clues implicating money or sex. No signs of robbery. Deborah’s body was covered by the down-quilted gray overcoat she had donned that chilly morning of November 30, 1984, the week after Thanksgiving. Her winter gloves were still stuffed in the pockets of the overcoat. Her wristwatch was still on her wrist. Nor was there a recognizable sexual assault. Deborah Wilson died still fully clothed, in jeans and a blue, long-sleeve pullover blouse, except for her feet, which were bare. Only her white Reebok sneakers and socks were missing.

There was no rational reason Deborah Wilson had to die. The police would make no progress until they broke out of investigative routine and accepted the fact that the crime was beyond normal human comprehension and traditional standards of morality-or amorality, in fact.

This was no ordinary murder. It was a gruesome act of depravity. It was a New Age crime, a “Me Generation” murder. It wasn’t one of those pre-1960s killings that cops now saw in a bizarre haze of near-nostalgia: A jealous man shoots his two-timing wife, a law partner gets snuffed for half the firm. Those old-time killers were almost understandable to average folks. The cops always knew where to look: the husband, the law partner, someone the dead man knew well.

But this kind of murder, a lovely, wholesome young woman killed for no reason at all-this was crazy time, cops figured. But it wasn’t crazy; it was sane, methodical, cold, well-planned. Just another middle-class American exploiting the bounty of unprecedented affluence and freedom, steady employment, his own house and car, ample leisure time, a king’s library of depraved instructional media images, a large supply of young, tolerant, fun-seeking acquaintances-all the resources, in other words, that only aristocrats like the Marquis de Sade once possessed to sample and deeply explore their hungers. Just an everyday late-twentieth-century American monster.

De Tocqueville warned of the dumbing-down of America, but he never imagined this. The elite forms of evil had gone mass-market.

Still looking up at the screen, Walter thought to himself, Young man, I know what you’re up to. One ought not to do such things. You can’t hide from me.

As Snyder began to describe the case, Walter sensed an air of excitement in the eighteenth-century hall. He detected a new seriousness, an intense focus from his peers. Fleisher had said the eyes of the world were on them now. Adding to the anticipation, another prominent journalist guest, Lewis Beale, a writer on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, was sitting at Fleisher’s table, scribbling notes. Beale specialized in cop stories. He had interviewed the L.A. cops who advised Hill Street Blues director Barry Levinson about his TV series Homicide and Sidney Lumet, director of Serpico. When he described the Vidocq Society, it sounded like a ’50s film noir band of forensic brothers “who pool their experience and intellect attempting to solve the unsolvable.”

Fleisher, Walter, and Bender were astonished. The Vidocq Society had become the media flavor of the moment. A noted film agent who sold the classic mob pic Goodfellas wanted to represent them. A month earlier, the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer had touted the colorful club as avengers of “unsolvable crimes.” A week after that, the Sunday Miami Herald published the same story under the headline, THIS CLUB’S WHODUNITS ARE REAL. Suddenly there was pressure to solve crimes, not just discuss them. The Sunday New York Times, the previous spring, had captured the society’s fanciful Sherlock Holmes style with its dispatch, FIRST THEY DINE, THEN TALK TURNS TO MURDER.

While opportunities were nice, Walter kept them focused on reality. “Point A: We didn’t start this for recognition. Point B: We haven’t done anything to deserve recognition. Point C: Journalists are romanticizing us, turning us into heroes, to sell newspapers. Point D: They wouldn’t be able to do this unless there was a real need. It doesn’t matter how they portray us. The fact of the matter is crime is out of control in our society. People need our help.”

The publicity had brought requests flooding into the Vidocq Society’s P.O. box in Philadelphia -in letters, packages, court files, pleas for help, songs of woe. A Los Angeles man wanted the society to investigate his father’s murder, which had occured thirty years earlier. A United States congressman needed confidential assistance to solve a friend’s murder.

The desire to help was animating the whole society. Friel’s return from Texas and the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children had lit a fire. Fleisher boasted in the Times that the society was a “college of detectives” without equal in the world. Now they had a chance to prove it.

Friel backed his Texas conversion with more than words. It was Friel who persuaded Sergeant Snyder to present Wilson ’s murder before the group for a “fresh set of eyes.” Friel had worked with Snyder in the homicide division in 1984, when Deborah Wilson was killed, and although he didn’t work the case, he and Snyder talked about it often over the years; the college student’s murder still bothered him.

Friel knew what Snyder was feeling, especially toward the end of his career when he was running out of chances. “Bob Snyder is truly a legend in homicide, the consummate homicide detective,” Friel said. “But there are cases you can’t let go of.”

Walter was impressed as he appraised Snyder at the podium. It was an important step that one of the city’s finest detectives had asked for their help. When mobster Frankie Flowers was killed in the Mafia wars, Snyder was the shoe leather the department sent out to find the killer.

Walter felt bad for the hardworking cops, and also for Deborah. He knew how they stewed in a hard boil of grief and rage, haunted by an unanswerable question: Why? There was no rational reason; closure was impossible.

It’s time to out the bastard, he thought. That much I can do.

As Snyder discussed the crime scene, Walter sipped his black coffee and listened.

On the evening of Friday, November 29, 1984, Deborah was working late on a computer project in Randell Hall, a landmark campus building, the detective said. The ornate stone edifice, built in 1901, was a huge labyrinth of classrooms and offices famously difficult to navigate.

At 11 P.M., Deborah called her parents’ home across the river in New Jersey from a computer lab. She said she had to keep working to finish the assignment due the next morning. Gifted at mathematics, her major, Deborah struggled with other courses, including computer science. But she was a disciplined student who put in the long hours needed to excel. She didn’t have a boyfriend, though young men were interested in her, and didn’t smoke or drink. She had modeled and played clarinet in high school but focused on academics in college. Living at home with her parents and commuting to Drexel, she kept her eyes on the future. “She wanted to be an engineer,” her sister Suzanne Leis had said. “She was determined she could do it.” A photograph of a new Mercedes-Benz sedan hung on her bedroom wall as incentive.