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Although inspired in part by a true incident, the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.
May 6th 1992
“…and I put it to you, Your Honour, that the defendant had ample opportunity to kill these two sisters, as well as motive. The only mystery still remaining? Where these two young ladies are. But I can say that, without a doubt, the defendant is guilty.”
Cragen looked over at the defendant, Walter Hunter, aged twenty-five, of Prospect Place, just outside Brooklyn. The skinny man with salt-and-pepper hair and sunken cheeks had been the prime suspect for the Newman sisters’ murders since his arrest the day before last New Year’s Eve.
Cragen couldn’t help thinking that as there were no bodies, the two sisters, seventeen-year-old Laurie and thirteen-year-old Hannah, had run away. After all, they had vanished in the Newman’s car, which was also missing. But there were no problems at home. Laurie had been down for NYU. Hannah had left behind her spare inhaler. They had gone to a party with no spare clothes and eight dollars seventy.
The pictures of the two blonde girls, held together in an embrace at Thanksgiving, had been all over the media.
They had gone to a party on Boxing Day 1991, in the village of Lake Success on Long Island. Cragen remembered the search; last seen only a block from Hunter’s home, where Laurie had telephoned her friend at the party from a callbox, then they had simply vanished into thin air.
“The defendant’s diary depicts that there was a sexual relationship between himself and Laurie Newman,” the prosecution went on, as Cragen shuffled in his seat, the man’s piercing voice making him feel uncomfortable, “from August 1991 up until she disappeared. Indeed, on Christmas Day she visited his house.”
“She was legal!” Hunter shouted from the dock, his desperation sounding like a squeal.
The judge banged his gavel and objected, as Hunter looked back down at the floor.
“As Mr Hunter said,” the prosecution smirked, “Laurie was certainly legal. She had turned seventeen in June 1991 and this relationship began that August. However, this diary was only started at the end of July, so we do not know if the relationship started prior to that date. Nor if he had been having a sexual relationship with Hannah.”
“Relevance, please?” the judge queried.
“I am just insinuating, Your Honour, that the disappearance of two young girls implies a sexual motive. And if Laurie was abducted for that reason, it may have been for both girls. Of course, this is simply speculation. But the fact remains that this diary,” he held the scruffy, yellow book aloft, which the jury had all skim-read and some had looked a little unsettled, “as well as reports from reliable witnesses, mainly visitors to the house in the summer and fall of last year, that Laurie Newman and Walter Hunter had been having consensual intercourse.”
Hunter’s defence stood up and Cragen sighed to himself. The defence was Sally Marsh, a rather young, inexperienced lawyer. This was only her third criminal case and she had lost the first two.
Sally explained that even if Walter and Laurie had been having sex, that was no reason to suggest that he had murdered the two sisters. Someone else may have killed them. True, they had not arrived at the party, but they may have had car trouble. Someone could have helped them. Someone with an ulterior motive.
But then the prosecution interrupted by arguing that Hunter had had a job at a garage down the block from his home and only three houses from the callbox. He had been working at the garage between 5pm and 7.30pm, alone. Laurie had called her friend at 8.30pm, about how Hannah had felt a little sick, but they were coming anyway. Hunter said that he had left at 7.30pm, but a customer had called up at 8pm. Telephone records proved this.
Surely, the prosecution argued, this was Hunter attempting to distance himself from the crime scene. As a mechanic, he could have disassembled the car. Perhaps not in the garage itself, but afterward.
The girls had vanished on Boxing Day and he was arrested the day before New Year’s Eve. That meant that there was an eighty-seven hour window in which to take the car parts to another garage or even a scrapheap. Sadly, none of these places within twenty miles of Prospect Place had been searched until January 6th.
Maybe he’d even driven the car up to a beach and waited for the tide to take it.
Cragen thought to himself quietly. While the prosecution presented an ironclad case, one of the eyewitness reports from Lake Success had said that he saw the car – and he was a friend of Laurie’s – only two blocks from the party at roughly 8pm.
Still, Cragen told himself, it was dark. It had been out of the corner of their eye. He may have been mistaken.
Cragen had seen Hunter’s record. Two and a half years before the girls vanished, Hunter had taken apart a girlfriend’s car, just because she had left him. True, he showed spitefulness, but surely not murder?
Besides, both Cragen and Sally had said, how could Hunter even have known that the sisters would be there?
But something niggled at the back of Cragen’s mind. Walter was the prime suspect. He had been having sex with Laurie. He had been cruel when a girlfriend broke up with him. He had a weak alibi. He knew how to make a car vanish. The callbox had been on his block.
As much as Cragen hated to admit it, since the guy had seemed friendly enough, Hunter seemed guilty.
Cragen had interrogated Hunter for ten hours. Hunter had been cried that he hadn’t hurt the girls. He loved Laurie. And Hannah was only a child.
Maybe it hadn’t been a sexual motive, Cragen told himself. Maybe Laurie had driven into Hunter’s garage, seeing as she was outside it. She may have told Hunter that she was breaking up with him. He had reacted, perhaps beating her with a spanner in his hand. Hannah had witnessed it and he killed her.
It could happen to anyone, Cragen had told himself.
But, sexual motive or not, Hunter was found guilty on two counts of kidnapping and two counts of murder.
Sentenced to death, Hunter had pleaded and wept as he was taken away to Attica.
Cragen wondered if justice had indeed been served.
June 28th 2002
“Captain,” Finn held up a piece of paper as he entered Cragen’s office, “there’s been a car found in Lake Success.”
Cragen stopped signing something and looked up. “Inside the lake itself, or in the village?”
“The lake,” Finn placed the paper on the desk, which had been faxed over. A photo of a rusted car was held there with a paper clip. “They think it’s a green 1989 Volvo.”
Cragen frowned. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“That’s because it’s the car from the Newman sisters’ case.” Finn replied.
A chill ran down Cragen’s spine. “I was on that case. Ten years ago. I saw Walter Hunter go to prison.”
Then he looked up, heart pounding. “Were the girls inside?” He would have expected the car to have been taken apart, knowing Hunter’s profession.
“Yeah, they were found inside.” Finn looked saddened, which made Cragen wonder. Surely that was expected?
Finn sighed, breathing outward, as if he was struggling to explain this.
“They were in the front seats. They were seatbelted in. Same clothes they were wearing when they disappeared. Every button and zip done up. It looks like an accident. Forensics think they skidded off the road. No-one heard them screaming. At least it looks like it was quick.”
Then he asked, “Captain?”
Cragen was biting his lip. “Hunter might be innocent.”
An innocent man had been sentenced to death. Luckily the execution date was three months away, which lifted the burden somewhat from Cragen’s shoulders, but the thought still haunted him nevertheless.
In the main room, Cragen pointed to a whiteboard, with the pictures of both the two sisters and the car, with autopsy pictures of the skeletons. Pointing at them, he trailed off what he knew.
“Dental records and DNA results are already underway, but the autopsies revealed that the first skeleton, found in the driver’s seat, is of a white female aged seventeen to twenty-one years. The second skeleton is of a white female aged twelve to fifteen years. They died between roughly five to twelve years ago. These descriptions and dates match with the Newman case and the car has been identified as the car belonging to the Newmans.”
“Captain, are you sure that they weren’t murdered?” Stabler asked, arms folded and head on its side.
“Positive,” Cragen sighed, turning back, “a killer probably wouldn’t bother to redress them before placing their bodies inside. Huang said that they are more likely to place the bodies in the trunk. If an accident was being faked, however, the murder would not have been committed on an icy night. It would have been extremely unlikely that Hunter, being the skinny, underweight man he was even before his arrest, would have pushed a car with two dead bodies inside into the lake, surrounded by ice and snow.”
“Wasn’t the water frozen on the lake?” Benson raised an eyebrow.
“The area where they were found is some way from the nearest houses. Besides, police ended up coming to the party at 7.50pm to say that they were being too loud. If you allow for the fact that it takes twenty minutes to drive to Lake Success from the callbox…” his voice trailed off.
“We understand, Cap,” Stabler tried to reassure him, “you were certain that Hunter was guilty. I thought he was guilty and I wasn’t even on the case.”
“There was just too much evidence to suggest that he was guilty,” Benson butted in, “but the problem is now, people will be even more likely to disbelieve ‘murder-without-a-body’ cases.”
It seemed to be that if the team progressed, something would hold others back.
Benson went to talk to the Newman parents. Tragically, Mr. Newman had died only three weeks earlier, of a terminal illness. Mrs Newman was still alive, as were the girls’ two sisters.
“I can’t believe it,” Mrs Newman sniffled as she sat in the armchair at her house, Olivia in the one adjacent, “we – we hated Hunter for ten years. We thought he’d murdered our little girls. Ian – Ian and I used to visit on the anniversary – and on their birthdays – we’d ask – we’d ask him where he put their bodies. He always said that he hadn’t killed them. We thought, ‘he’s evil, just pure evil’. But – in the lake – for ten years. Ian – oh, Ian!”
She started howling profusely, as her youngest daughter held her close.
“We did what we could to keep the case alive,” Jade Newman, a young woman of twenty-one, told Olivia, “we wrote to the New York governor, we took part in marches to stop violence against women, we went on TV more than eight times in the last five years –“ She sighed.
Olivia tried to comfort the two of them. “You still did a fantastic job. I’m sure they’re proud of you.”
Jade nodded. “I didn’t hate Hunter. I disliked him, true, but I was brought up to know that it’s wrong to hate. I couldn’t forgive him. I hope he forgives us.”
Laurie and Hannah were buried on July 8th, one either side of Ian’s grave.
Walter Hunter was to be exonerated by the New York State Police and was to be released in two weeks’ time.
Olivia didn’t know what to say.
“It’s difficult, Captain,” she had said, while in Cragen’s office, “Hunter’s innocent, but he’s been in prison for ten years and I’m pretty sure he’ll struggle to adapt when he gets out. Meanwhile the Newmans have been accusing the wrong man for several years and feel terrible about themselves. Add that to learning that the girls died in an accident and it just becomes horrendous.” She paused. “What about Hunter’s alibi? Was he really at the garage?”
“An overlooked piece of evidence stated that the owner of the garage altered the clock the day after the girls vanished when he came in to work. It was an hour off. There was no much paperwork that it was missed.”
“A guy goes to prison because of a faulty clock,” Olivia sighed, “sometimes I wonder if we do the right thing.”
“Course we do, Benson,” Cragen answered, “it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we have.”
Inspired in part by the David Lykken case.