The Cop and the Cannibal: He was an educated man with degrees in philosophy and computer science. He was also a meth addict, with a taste for human flesh.
Loved and Lost: Mourning the death of her infant son, Dynel goes looking for a child to replace him, targeting an expectant mother.
Taking Innocence: A little girl goes missing from a busy street. Years later, the truth emerges, unmasking a vile pedophile, hiding behind a mask of respectability.
Unspecified Psychosis: A young mother suffers a mental breakdown. Those around her, especially her children, are in mortal danger.
Wrong Turn: It started as a pleasant road trip and ended in a tragic death. It was compounded by a miscarriage of justice.
Making a Murderer: A former Marine with anger issues, dulling his pain with booze and pills, skirting the edge of a breakdown. When it comes, take cover.
A Killing in Whitechapel: Before the Ripper walked these streets, there were other killers around, preying on the weak and unwary.
Murder Most Vile Volume 49
Walk in Shadow
John and Nancy Bosco had come to Montana for the lifestyle. The couple had fallen in love with the rugged beauty of Big Sky Country during a visit from their native Colorado and decided that they wanted to live there. Just a few months later, they’d packed up their things and made the 1,000-mile trip north. They’d found a handsome property on the outskirts of Bigfork. John, a talented woodworker, was going to build and sell high-end archery bows. Already, he had a stack of orders.
But this dream of a new life, of escaping the rat race, of living close to nature, would last just six months. On August 19, 1993, the Flathead County Sherriff’s Department received a call from John Bosco’s concerned relatives in Boulder, Colorado. Several calls to the couple had gone unanswered in the last few days. A deputy was dispatched to check it out and arrived to the sight of newspapers piled up on the porch. Knocking on the door brought no response and so the officer rounded the house and found an open window to the basement. He noticed something else, too. The telephone line had been cut.
That was ominous, and it was only the first sign that something was not right. The power had been turned off, and there was a faint but unpleasant odor in the air, as though the food in the refrigerator had spoiled. There also seemed to be a lot of flies buzzing around, their high-pitched thrum increasing as the deputy climbed the stairs. At the end of the hall was the door to the master bedroom. Here, both the buzzing and the stench were at their worst. The officer already had a good idea of what he was going to find on the other side. He had to open the door nonetheless.
John and Nancy Bosco were lying on their bed, their blood-spattered corpses covered in black flies, crawling with maggots. John’s face was exposed, and it was quite obvious that he’d been shot in the head, the bullet entering just above the eye. Nancy had a pillow placed over her head. One curious detail was the different states of decomposition of the two corpses. John’s skin had already turned black; Nancy’s appeared to be considerably more well-preserved. That seemed to suggest that this might be a murder/suicide. Had Nancy shot her husband and later lay down beside him on the bed and taken her own life? That would be up to the coroner and the homicide squad to determine. The deputy backed out of the room, walked down to his cruiser, and called it in.
John Bosco had met his wife, Nancy, at a difficult time in his life. He’d just come through a messy break-up and was in the midst of a bitter battle for custody of his two daughters. Nancy proved to be the perfect antidote to his troubles. She was outgoing, active, beautiful. She shared his love of the outdoors. Sparks flew during their first meeting, and it wasn’t long before they were dating. They married in late 1990. Just two years later, they’d be making the big move to Montana, the big move that would end up costing both their lives.
But who had killed them, and why? The answer to that question was elusive. Nothing had been taken from the house, and the condition of the bodies made it impossible to determine whether Nancy had been sexually assaulted. One scenario that detectives could rule out was the murder/suicide hypothesis. No firearm was found at the scene. John’s .367 Magnum was missing, but it was not the murder weapon. The couple had been killed with a 9mm pistol. John, it appeared, had been shot in the head while he slept. Nancy, awakened by the gunshot, had been shot in the back as she tried to get up. She was then executed with a second shot that passed through her cheek.
So why the different rates of decomposition? That was down to the pillow that had been placed over Nancy’s face. It meant that flies could not access her open wounds to lay their eggs. These eggs, of course, hatch into maggots, which then begin consuming the flesh of the corpse. John, exposed to the elements, had simply been an easier target.
Bigfork, Montana is a small town with a population barely exceeding 4,000. Its police department was not equipped to deal with an investigation of this nature and jurisdiction therefore fell to the state police, the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation or DCI. Investigators of this force began by trying to establish a motive for the double homicide. This looked like it was personal. Was there anyone who might have harbored a grudge against the couple? As it turned out, there were quite a few.
The first and most obvious candidate was John Bosco’s ex. Their failed relationship and the custody fight that ensued had turned into open warfare. At one point, John had become disillusioned with the legal process and had moved the girls from Colorado to Montana without the approval of the court. That had resulted in a lawsuit and a mandated return of the children to their mother, a woman who John claimed was abusive to the girls. She, unsurprisingly, did not have a lot of good things to say about her ex. But she denied having anything to do with his death. She would not deprive her kids of their dad, she said.
But perhaps there were others who did not share those particular scruples. John Bosco appears to have been a combative individual with a healthy dose of paranoia thrown in for good measure. During the ongoing custody battle, he’d made allegations of corruption and conspiracy against court officials and had threatened to bring a legal case against them. He’d also told several people that if anything were to happen to him, it would be down to these individuals. The implication was that they might hire a hitman to silence him.
These claims, it seems, were totally unfounded. The DCI did not take them seriously. They were looking at suspects much closer to home and soon uncovered a complaint filed by the Boscos regarding local teenagers hiding in the bushes on their property to ogle Nancy while she sunbathed on the deck. Might one of these peeping toms have embarked on a testosterone-driven murder spree? It seemed unlikely. A far more promising lead lay in a property deal gone sour. Just a few months into his new life in Bigfork, John Bosco had managed to embroil himself in yet another contentious litigation.
This one had to do with the new home he and Nancy had purchased. They’d bought the property from a man named Joe Clark and John had enthused to his family back in Colorado about the great deal he’d got. But John had planned on running his woodworking business from the property and he soon learned that that would not be possible. The house did not have commercial rights. This angered John. According to him, he had specifically queried the seller on the issue and had been assured that it would not be a problem. He accused Clark of misleading him. Clark denied this and Bosco took legal advice. The dispute was still ongoing at the time of the murders.
Was a simple legal dispute sufficient motive for murder? Of course it was. People have been killed for far less. Was Joe Clark a likely murder suspect? On the surface, no. Clark was a well-respected local businessman. His family was staunchly Christian, active in church affairs. The only slight blot on their reputation was Joseph Jr., a mischievous teen who went by his middle name, Shadow. He’d been called up on some minor misdemeanors mostly relating to graffiti. Joe Clark was interviewed by the police and quickly dismissed as a suspect. At this stage, the case was colder than a Montana winter.
In fact, John Bosco’s mother, Antoinette, became so frustrated with the lack of progress that she employed the services of a psychic, Dannion Brinkley, to get to the bottom of the brutal double homicide. Brinkley claimed to have gained his abilities after being struck by lightning. Three months after the murders, In November 1993, he sat down with the grieving mother. He told her that the killer was a young man of 19 or 20 years, slightly-built with dark hair and deep-set eyes. He said that this individual had an intimate knowledge of the house where the murders happened. He also told Antoinette that the killer had since left Bigfork to attend a college ‘out west.’ None of this suggested much by way of an actual lead but Brinkley’s final prediction did at least offer hope of a resolution to the case. According to him, the killer would be caught within a month.
Antoinette Bosco must have been impressed with Dannion Brinkley’s psychic abilities because she enthusiastically shared his insights with the DCI. Or perhaps she was just desperate to see her son’s killer brought to justice. In any case, the DCI gave little credence to these paranormal insights. Police departments seldom do.
In December 1993, investigators received a call from their counterparts in Newberg, Oregon. A student at George Fox University, a Christian college in the town, had phoned in a tip. According to the tipster, one of his classmates, a young man known as ‘Shadow,’ had made some troubling pronouncements to a group of his peers. Shadow, who seemed to revel in his bad boy reputation, had boasted about a double homicide he’d committed in Bigfork. He’d even shown the group a 9mm pistol, which he claimed was the murder weapon.
To the DCI investigators, the case that Shadow had spoken about could only be the Bosco murders. But were these just empty boasts, aimed at bigging Shadow up in the eyes of his peers? There was only one way to find out. Investigators made the 600-mile trip to Oregon to question Shadow. He was pulled from class by local police on the pretense of answering questions relating to graffiti. Imagine his surprise when he entered the interview room and was introduced to a pair of DCI agents from his home state.
Still, Shadow hung tough, keeping up his denials for three hours. He admitted telling the story and even conceded that he was referencing the Bosco murders. However, he claimed that he was just blowing smoke to impress his classmates. He hadn’t killed anyone. He was just repeating what he’d read in the papers and seen on the news.
Three hours in, however, and Shadow was starting to crack. Now he started talking about a dream he’d had, a dream in which he enters a house and executes the occupants in their sleep. In the dream, he also has sex with a ‘faceless woman.’ This story stunned investigators. What Shadow was describing in his ‘dream sequence’ was the killing of John and Nancy Bosco. The faceless woman he was referencing was Nancy with a pillow placed over her head. Shadow was confessing to a double homicide and to an act of necrophilia.
Shadow was, of course, Joseph Shadow Clark, the son of Joseph Clark, who’d been involved in the ongoing property dispute with John Bosco. He was also one of the group of teens who had spied on Nancy. So, what was Clark’s motive for murder? Was it to do with the legal wrangle or had his lust for Nancy turned him into a killer? Clark wasn’t saying. Although he later gave a full confession, he’d never say why he did it.
Joseph Shadow Clark was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to 220 years in prison. That was reduced on appeal to 150 years but Clark will still have to remain behind bars for at least four decades. He will be in his 60s by the time he is eligible for parole.
There is one other aspect of this case that bears exploring, the predictions made by psychic Dannion Brinkley. Brinkley had said that the killer was a slightly built man, aged 19 or 20. Joe Shadow Clark was 5’7” and 127 pounds; he was 19 years old. He also had dark hair and deep-set eyes and had gone to a college out west, just as Brinkley had stated. The psychic also said that the killer knew the layout of the property where the murder occurred. Shadow grew up in the house. Lastly, there is Brinkley’s foretelling of the arrest. He had predicted in November that the killer would be in custody within a month. He was.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.