Her parents often fretted about their open, trusting, somewhat naïve young daughter working late in the crime-ridden West Philadelphia neighborhood. But Deborah assured them the engineering building was safe, and when she was done she would get a security escort to her car.

Two and a half hours later, at 1:30 in the morning, Deborah called home again and told her parents she still needed another hour to complete the project, but they shouldn’t worry. Her ex-boyfriend, Kurt Rahner, was there with her in the computer room. He’d wait and walk her to her car.

But Rahner didn’t wait. He left the computer room shortly afterward. On his way home, he asked a campus security guard to make sure Deborah got safely to her car, and the guard passed word to campus guard David Dickson. Dickson patrolled the campus on the midnight-to-8 A.M. shift, and was responsible for the computer room.

A few minutes after 1:30 in the morning, Deborah was alone in the lab, working on the computer, when she was attacked. At 1:38 in the morning, computer records show, she made her “last transaction” on the computer. It seemed hurried as if “she was interrupted,” said Drexel computer administrator John J. Gould Jr. “It looked like she stopped in the middle of what she was doing.” Snyder had reconstructed the likely events. Her attacker apparently surprised her and beat her into submission, Snyder said. Then he strangled her to death with an electric extension cord; the cord was discarded near the computer, its grooves matching the marks on Deborah’s neck.

At three in the morning, when her parents hadn’t heard from her, they reassured themselves she was sleeping in the computer room while pulling an all-nighter. In fact, by three in the morning, according to the coroner, she was already dead. In the huge, dark, empty building, her killer carried or dragged her body through the maze of halls and through a door that led to a protected concrete stairwell on the outside of the building. At the bottom of the cold, quiet stairwell on the bitter winter night, he continued to savagely beat her corpse with two bricks, a yard-long piece of lumber, and a strip of metal. The three makeshift weapons were found lying near her body, smeared with her blood.

At nine that morning, two passing students found Wilson ’s body in the stairwell, on a landing eleven steps below street level.

As Snyder spoke, Fleisher passed around additional pictures of Wilson ’s body, a bloodstain found in the computer room and the type of computer she was working on when she died, and the type of sneakers she was wearing. White Reeboks. White socks.

Fleisher joined Snyder at the podium and opened the floor to questions.

“What about the security guard? ” Fleisher himself started it off.

“Dickson was an immediate suspect,” Snyder said. He was the obvious choice. In police interviews, he was shaky about his whereabouts during the course of the evening. But he had an alibi: He told the other guard on duty he’d been talking on the phone with his girlfriend and forgot to escort Wilson to her car. He failed part of a polygraph test, but polygraphs are inadmissible in court. “We never had enough to arrest him,” Snyder said.

The questions came in a torrent.

“Was there a janitor on duty at the time?”

No, Snyder said.

“Were there any arrests for burglary made on campus that night?”

No.

“Have you tried DNA testing?” Heads turned to Halbert Fillinger, the veteran Philadelphia medical examiner. “There may be traces of the killer’s skin nuclei on the cord he used to strangle her if he gripped it tightly enough,” he said. “That residue could be tested for the killer’s DNA.”

Puzzled looks went around the room. DNA testing had not been available when Wilson was killed in 1984; nor was it a well-known technology eight years later. “It’s a long shot,” the Los Angeles Times reporter concluded. “But right now Snyder is willing to clutch on to any suggestion. He’s frustrated by his inability to move the case forward.”

After half an hour, Snyder slumped at the podium. The question-and-answer session was winding down, and he’d gotten little more than free lunch, moral support, and a few interesting ideas.

Suddenly Walter, whose habit, like the anchorman of a relay, was to take the baton at the end, spoke up. He frowned and adjusted his owlish black glasses on his aquiline nose.

“If I might offer an opinion,” he began crisply, “the key to the case is the absence of the victim’s shoes and socks.”

Snyder nodded. “We know the missing footwear was significant. We just didn’t know how.”

Walter nodded. “There is no robbery, yet her white Reeboks and white athletic socks are missing. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Not waiting for an answer, he raised more questions:

“The crucial question is, what is the value of the killing? What did he propose to get? Since he didn’t sexually assault her, what value was it? He tells us by the absence of the shoes and socks. He doesn’t want money. She’s still wearing her wristwatch. He doesn’t want a fuck. He wants the shoes. He’s a foot fetishist.”

Murmurs swept the room.

“Do foot fetishists kill for it?” a police officer asked.

“No, not often,” Walter acknowledged. “A foot fetish is a paraphilia, a sexual deviance. Afraid to engage a living and breathing sex partner, the fetishist uses the shoe as a stand-in for anyone his imagination can conjure. He gains a secondary or tertiary level of sexual satisfaction through sniffing and feeling and touching and rubbing the shoe, and maybe masturbating with it on him.”

To titters of amusement, Walter said, “Foot fetishes may be bizarrely amusing, but they can be very powerful and damaging. This is why the Chinese bound their women’s feet into a shape they could slip their dick into, and there was so much resistance to change. The whole culture was bound by the power and fantasy of this fetish.”

Walter quickly sketched his view of the crime. The killer is obsessed with women’s shoes; he collects them, masturbates over them. In all likelihood, he probably can’t even sustain an erection around a real woman. “It’s the representation, not the reality, he craves.” He has noticed Wilson before and her white Reeboks. He’s probably never killed anyone before, but his fantasy is escalating from merely stealing someone’s shoes to confronting the wearer.

Lost in his fantasy, somewhat akin to the Gentleman Rapist, he believes himself irresistible to women. Once he reveals his charms she’s going to say, “Where have you been all my life.” A large, powerful man, he intimidates Wilson when he enters the computer room, finding her alone. “He tries to chat her up for sex, or to go somewhere with him, form some sort of relationship, and she refuses. Possibly he threatens her, things like, she’s a whore being there alone and this or that, he verbally assaults her to scare her. It doesn’t matter to him. Either way it’s just a vehicle to get what he wants. He may tell himself he wants sex, a conquest, but we fool ourselves. Really he knows the bottom line is the shoes and socks.”

Wilson, like many victims in this situation, tells him no, timidly or forcefully, maybe she tells him to go to hell. It doesn’t much matter. The response is fury-the fury that sparks attack, murder, and postmortem attack. “Intellectually he knows she’s not going to cooperate, but on the level of fantasy when she tells him to fuck off or whatever he has an explosive reaction to the indignity. He’s had a power loss, not the power gain he dreamed of, and he goes ballistic. This is the energy that fuels the crime.”

The killer assaults her in the computer room, beating her face and head with his fists and possibly weapons, causing her mortal agony and terror. “She’s screaming, pleading, and he has to shut her up so he strangles her.” He drags her corpse to the bottom of the stairwell, now his dark, private lair. “This is very sexual,” the forensic psychologist said, giving voice to his earlier thoughts. “In Freudian terms, it’s the vagina and you’re going down into it. It’s a sensuality independent of the fuck. He doesn’t want the fuck, he wants the shoes. He’ll sniff them up at home. The stairwell is a foreplay kind of entrée; it helps set the sexual context later. He took what he wanted for that. He didn’t want her tingly parts. He continues to beat her out of the anger of rejection of his fantasy, but really he wants the shoes. Basically, he needs to neutralize her so he can harvest from her what he wants. He does it and leaves.”