CHAPTER 5: MURDER PATTERNS REVEALED
Justin was with the body of Cliff in the autopsy room, examining it like he did with Lionel Han’s siblings. This time, Judith was there to watch too besides our head of the crime lab, Jonathan. At first Jonathan didn’t want her around the corpse but after she promised profusely that she wouldn’t eat a thing in front of him and the corpse, he reluctantly allowed her to enter the autopsy room.
“You’re right, Jon,” Justin said as he looked into the jagged patterns on Cliff’s jugular. “It is done by an army knife. The pressure was pretty hard too, judging by the sliced veins and the slightly marked neck bones, the ruined trachea and the voice box. He practically couldn’t say a single word without choking in his own blood and having them filling up his lungs. If this disembowelment didn’t take place, he could’ve died just by that slit throat alone.”
“Only that he didn’t die by the slit throat, did he?” Jonathan asked.
“Nope, it was the disembowelment that killed him. The slit wound was much older than the gut wound,” Justin said as he pointed from the throat to the guts. “His nails are covered with his own blood as he scraped that roof of the car while the murderer tried to hang him upside-down from the tree. Besides, if he was disemboweled before he was hung up there, you would’ve found trails of blood mixed together with his gut juice on the ground where he was dragged towards the car and not just only on the roof of the car.”
“That’s true,” Judith replied as she recalled that there was a long trail of dragged blood on the earth. She had taken it to analysis and it was confirmed that it was Cliff’s blood and nothing else. “Could we be looking for someone who is an ex-army or has a family member who was an ex-army?”
“The latter. I’ve already have a few young suspects and I’m trying to figure out who could’ve done it. Well, if the throat slit didn’t kill him, the disembowelment would,” Jonathan said. “If the disembowelment doesn’t kill him too, I don’t what else would.”
“High cholesterol, maybe?” Justin suggested jokingly. “’Coz I seem to find some of his dinner here: steak, French fries, potato chips, hot dog, hard-boiled eggs…pretty lot of oil and fat for that, don’t you think?” He then turned to Judith with a grin on his face and said, “This food reminds me that I haven’t had my dinner. Would you mind passing me a slice of pizza from the box there, Jude?”
Judith looked at Jonathan with a It’s-not-my-fault look on her face as she took out a slice of pizza from the Pizza Hut box and passed it to Justin, stealing a bite of sausage. Jonathan groaned in disgust at Justin took a bite out of the pizza and replaced it back into the box.
“You guys are so disgusting!!!” Jonathan exclaimed, looking at the chewing Judith and Justin in disbelief and horror. “How could you guys stomach such food in front of a corpse who just had his guts pulled out of his body?! Eww~!!”
“That is part of doctor training, you know,” Justin replied in an as-a-matter-of-fact way. “We are all trained to strengthen our guts by eating in front of a corpse during meals during our junior years. Not much people could handle it though. I remember my first meal in front of a pickled corpse: chicken rice with sunny-side up eggs.”
“Well, I guess that explains that, but what about you?” Jonathan turned to Judith who was licking her fingers off the cheese she got from touching the pizza.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Judith replied proudly. “Being on the streets and in the wrong side of the law gives me plenty of time to strengthen my guts. Why, when I was in high school, I actually wolfed down a drumstick while watching pictures of accident victims being squashed flat on their stomachs and their entrails dragged along the road during an awareness campaign. And do you remember the ABC I ate while watching the biology team dissecting a frog during our college open day, or was it a toad?”
“A toad,” Jonathan replied, going blue. “How can I forget?”
“By the way, guys, the way you told me about the position this Cliff was in when he died was pretty familiar,” Justin said, tapping his chin.
“You too? I also think it’s familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger in it,” Judith replied.
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, this sounds a lot like the movie Urban Legends where this guy got hung up on the tree by the neck. Of course he wasn’t disemboweled like Cliff here. That would be Jack the Ripper’s work.”
“Are you telling me that this murderer is actually killing these people by following the pattern of horror movies?” Jonathan asked in disbelief. “Just like the murders in Scream and all?”
“Well, Scream could be one of them, but judging by the way Cliff was murdered and the way you described the murder of the Han siblings, the murderer is more of the pattern of Urban Legends,” Justin replied as he tried to recall the movie he watched. “Urban Legends is a movie about this girl who was caught in a web of murder where the murderer used urban legends to kill her victims. Her friends were killed one by one—first it was her high school classmate who was killed by the murderer in the back seat, then it was her roommate who was killed in the room without her knowledge because she remembered not to turn on the lights and not catch her naked with a guy, and a whole lot more using all kinds of urban legends. In the end it turned out that it was the heroine’s best friend who did all the killings because the heroine and her high school classmate have killed her boyfriend using the headlight urban legend.”
“Did the murderer die in the end?”
“Well, at first it looked like she was dead, but at the end of the movie, she actually survived and was studying in another college talking about urban legends with her new classmates,” Justin shrugged. “It’s pretty freaky, ‘coz she was thrown out of a building and thrown out of the car into a deep lake. There’s no way a normal human could survive that.”
“What about murders during ghost festivals? Is there any movie that is connected to people killing during a ghost festival?” Judith asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is one movie called ‘H2O: Halloween 20 Years Later’. It’s about this mass murderer who escaped from the mental asylum and walks around wearing a mask like this other movie’s murderer Jason in ‘Friday the 13th’ looking for his sister so that he could kill her. She was an unfinished job because he had killed everyone in the family when he was 5 or 6 years old except the sister, whom he missed out. And the funny thing is the psychopath—Mike Myers is his name—came to kill her during Halloween. When he killed his family, it was on a Halloween night, so I guess it was some sort of a ritual for him.”
“And this whole month of August is the Hungry Ghost Festival, a Chinese version of Halloween!” Judith exclaimed. “There’s another movie our copycat has been doing! He’s following the movie patterns of Urban Legends and H2O!”
“Woah, woah, woah, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here!” Jonathan tried to get all this info in his head. “Let me get this straight, Jude. You’re trying to tell me that we’re looking for a murderer who is a copycat and a movie buff?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” Judith said as she stole another sausage from Justin’s pizza and dashed out of the autopsy room. Jonathan was surprised at her sudden reaction. He chased after her.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To meet our Human Library,” Judith replied, quickening her pace and hoping that Rachel hasn’t gone to check out the car with Elaine yet.
“You want me to check on urban legends?”
Rachel was in her office room looking over the pictures taken by Rebecca earlier, lucky for Judith, and she was quite surprised to know that someone was asking her about something that was not connected to forensics.
“Yeah, I wanna know if there are any famous urban legends that are still existing till today,” Judith said, looking quite breathless. Jonathan was in the office too, wanting to see what bright ideas have spawned in his food-obsessed, suicidal co-worker.
“Well, I had this book for light reading,” Rachel replied as she took out a book as thick as the latest version of the Oxford dictionary and as big as an encyclopedia and plopped onto the table. “Maybe there is something for you to see about.”
“You call that ‘light’?” Jonathan wrinkled his nose at the book. ‘Light reading’ is definitely an understatement.
Rachel ignored his comment. She had always loved to read, regardless the thickness of the book. She flipped a few pages of the book entitled ‘Mysterious Mysteries’ and looked for the page on ‘Urban Legends’. She smiled, signifying that she had found it. She ran her fingers through the page and read it out loud:
“An urban legend is where a story which was claimed to be true is passed down from one person to another and as the more people the story was passed down, the more bigger the story goes and the more extravagant the details of the story is. For example, a story about an elderly woman choking on a bagel when passed down from one person to another might result to a story where the elderly woman was choking because there was a finger baked together with the bagel by the baker who lost it while cutting the dough’ or something like that.”
“What about urban legends? Are there any stories in there that might be considered an urban legend?” Judith asked as she flipped through the pages herself.
“There’s a lot I must say, but here’s a few that’s pretty good,” Rachel ran her finger through the book and read it out loud, “‘A young lady is alone in her apartment. She goes to bed with her dog on the floor beside her. In the middle of the night, she is woken up by a strange sound. She is alarmed, but reaches down to the dog which licked her hand. She was reassured and went back to bed. In the morning she found her dog hung in the shower and writings in blood on the wall saying Humans can lick too.’
“‘A woman was driving home from visiting her friend and noticed that a car was following her all the way. Try as she might, she couldn’t lose him. When she reached home, she honked for her husband and he came out to see what the matter was. When he demanded the man to tell him why he was following his wife, he said that he noticed a man’s head bob down in her back seat, and when the husband checked the back seat, he saw a deranged man sitting on the floor of the car with a knife in his hand.’
“‘Two roommates were staying back at school during the holidays. One went out on a date and the other one hit the hay before she came back. Later that night she was awakened by a gurgling and scratching sound outside the hallway door. Frightened, she locked the door and hid under the covers until morning. When she finally opened the door and ventured outside, she found the body of her roommate, her throat slit and bleeding to death in the hallway while clawing at the door.’”
“Oh, here’s another one,” Judith said as she took charge of the reading. “‘A male flight attendant was stopping over Japan and went to a local bar where he was greeted warmly by a couple and drank sake and chit-chatted. The next morning, he woke up and found himself in a bath tub full of ice and aches in his stomach. He managed to climb out of the tub and called the police, telling him everything he remembered about the couple. The police told him to go back to the tub and stay there until the ambulance arrived; both of his kidneys were removed.’ Ouch! That’s gotta hurt!”
“This one is about our two murders,” Jonathan said as he pointed at two urban legends in a page. “This one said that the babysitter received a laughing phone call after tucking the children to sleep a few minutes later. ‘The call repeated a few times and she decided to ask the police to trace the call. After the laughing came again, she hung up and the police called her immediately to tell her to get out of the house quickly—the calls were coming from the upstairs extension, where the murderer already murdered the children’, pretty much like Lionel’s case. And this one is on Cliff’s murder—‘A boy tried to trick a girl into “making out” with him but failed, so he sent the angry girl home instead. When the car ran out of gas, he came out of the car and walked towards the nearest gas station. She waited for nearly 2 hours but he didn’t come, and there were scratching sounds on the roof of the car. When she came out of the car to break off the ‘branch’, she found the boy hanging upside-down with his throat slit.’ OK, that’s freaky.”
“Here’s one urban legend that says one of a juvenile gang’s traditions was to drive with their headlights off and kill the first person to signal their headlights at them to warn them,” Rachel said. “And there’s another where to be a gang member they must hide under the car and wait until the owner of the car arrives before slashing their ankles and stealing a shoe. The things teenagers would do to feel belonged.”
“This is serious,” Jonathan said. “We have a copycat guy who is out there killing people and trying to make it look like he was a star of some horror movie. I’ve heard about TV influence, but this is too much!”
“Way too much. It’s like this guy is trying to symbolize something to his or her victims,” Judith said.
“He. It’s a ‘he’,” Jonathan corrected.
“How’d you know it’s a ‘he’?” Rachel asked as she closed her book.
“I told Jude I got a lead in this case, and I sure have a hunch who’s the murderer,” Jonathan said. “Now who’s in for the latest Kreko? Another new episode on Genzomaden Saiyuki: Reload is up!”
Judith and Rachel looked at each other tiredly. They should’ve seen this coming.
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