Faces of Evil Page 21

  Reading the article, my hands started to shake. This can’t happen here! I thought. Not HERE.

  I felt a personal sense of violation that this horrific crime had occurred, not in Houston, where I had come to expect violence, but in a rural, peaceful Kansas town.

  My obsession to step in, to pull out my drawing board and work the magic that I knew could possibly break this case took hold. The fact that the only witnesses were two little girls did not make me feel the task was daunting. I’d done sketches from witnesses as young as five years old. I could do this.

  Only one problem.

  I didn’t have my drawing board or any of my other supplies with me. After all, I was on vacation.

  Forget it, I told myself. YOU CAN’T SAVE THE WHOLE WORLD!

  I reached for the telephone…

  YOU’RE ON VACATION.

  Nevertheless I couldn’t stop myself. I grappled with the telephone directory, found a number…

  LET IT GO!

  I started to dial…

  “Newton Police Department.”

  I heard myself say, “Hello. My name is Lois Gibson, and I’m the forensic sketch artist for the Houston, Texas Police Department…”

  They listened to my offer but didn’t take me up on it, not then.

  “Until one morning in mid-November of 1959,” wrote Truman Capote in his landmark true-crime book, In Cold Blood, “few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. …Drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”

  Detective Sergeant T. Walton was not a typical small-town Kansas cop.

  A native of New York, he’d skinny-dipped at Woodstock and, during his student days at Kansas Wesleyan University, he’d sported dark hair that flowed down his back. His speech had the rapid-fire staccato of a machine-gun blast, rather than a Kansas down-home drawl, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  On the day Sarah Rinehart was bludgeoned to death in her bed, “T.,” as he preferred to be called, was just starting his very first day as a detective with the Newton Police Department.

  The original call had come into the police department as a burglary-in-progress. When concerned family members couldn’t find Sarah and couldn’t get an answer at her door, and when her older daughter, Jackie, came home from school and couldn’t get into her own house, they’d called Sarah’s brother-in-law, Robby Nachlinger, to go check on her. Robby, who happened to be home from work that day, was married to one of Sarah’s sisters and lived close by.

  He’d gone over, found Sarah’s car in the garage and her purse in the laundry room. Going from bedroom to bedroom, he’d discovered the children holed up in a closet. The hysterical girls told him that “a man” was in the house. As he led them down the hall, past Sarah’s closed bedroom door, Robby explained later, he’d had an overwhelming feeling that he should not open the bedroom door—not as long as he had the little girls with him—and decided it best to get them out of the house. He’d dialed 911, reported what he believed to be a burglary and hustled the children out the front door.

  The whole time, Sarah’s daughter, Jordan, was screaming, “Why did that man kill my mommy?”

  Robby always maintained that, since he had the girls with him and he didn’t know what he might find behind that closed door, he never looked into Sarah’s bedroom.

  Police thought otherwise.

  While crime scene technicians from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation powdered the Rinehart house with fingerprint dust, sprayed floors, walls, and sinks with Luminol (which causes blood stains to glow in the dark) and pored over the bedroom carpet, picking up stray fibers with sticky-tape, the Newton PD called in Robby Nachlinger for questioning in the death of his sister-in-law.

  What was your relationship with Sarah? they wanted to know. Why were you home from work that day? Why did you call in a burglary when nothing appeared to be missing from the house, including Sarah’s handbag?

  But while other investigators clustered around Robby, T. tried to voice his objections.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “These little girls have grown up in this town and Jordan’s aunts and uncles live all around her. She sure as hell ought to know the difference between her own uncle and a stranger.”

  T. pointed out that the girls had described the man who’d invaded their quiet home that day as having had long, curly dark hair and “yellow teeth.” Robby Nachlinger didn’t have long, curly dark hair or yellow teeth.

  But other ranking investigators considered T. a rookie.

  “It was pretty much like, ‘Go away, kid, ya bother me.’” T. said later.

  In the meantime, poor Robby Nachlinger did not help himself. Overwhelmed and nervous from the stressful events, having never been in trouble with the law before and inexperienced about such things, he blurted out to detectives that he’d actually been sexually attracted to his beautiful sister-in-law. That, in fact, he’d even entertained a few sexual fantasies about her.

  Nachlinger was a nursing student at the community college in town. Investigators learned that, about the time of the murder, something was missing from the nursing department. It seems that the training dummy used for the instruction of CPR, or cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, normally had sported a dark, curly wig.

  And the wig was gone.

  “Your pretty sister-in-law wouldn’t give you what you wanted, would she?” inquired detectives of the cringing brother-in-law. “So you put on that wig as a disguise, and you forced your way into her house, and you tied her up, and you MURDERED her!”

  The harder Robby denied their accusations, the harder they pressed.

  At first, the horrified family—Sarah’s husband, her parents, and her three surviving sisters—simply could not believe that the Newton Police were seriously considering their relative as a suspect in Sarah’s death. They urged Robby to take a polygraph test, so that the detectives would see, once and for all, that he was telling the truth.

  And Robby Nachlinger flunked the lie detector test.

  At this point, investigators decided, it was time to “take that Houston sketch artist up on her offer.”

  It was frustrating to me that the Newton Police Department postponed flying me out for the sketch session with Sarah Rinehart’s daughter and her friend all the way until the first of August. The crime had occurred the twentieth of May and it had been infuriating enough to me that I’d gone to Kansas in June without any of my equipment and had to come back to do the sketch, but I was surprised that it took until August to set up.

  I didn’t realize, of course, that the police were so focused on Robby Nachlinger that they didn’t think, until they called me, that they needed a sketch. At that time, not only was I asked to do a sketching session with Jordan Rinehart and her friend Ashley, but the police also actually took a photograph of Robby Nachlinger wearing a long, curly dark-haired wig and asked me to do a portrait of him—I guess for comparison purposes.

  And so I was, at last, flying back to Kansas, and I was glad that though the purpose in my trip was occasioned by a sad event, I’d get to have a visit with my beloved baby brother, Brent, and his family that did not involve a big family reunion.

  I dressed carefully for the sketching session because I knew I would be working with very young children, and I wanted to look more motherly than businesslike. By this time, these little girls had already been questioned so much and had been surrounded by so many law enforcement personnel, that I wanted to stand out in a way that would be entirely non-threatening. I chose a white silk dress that my own little girl at home liked.

  I also had the patrol officer pick me up about an hour early, so that I could familiarize myself with the layout of the department and figure out ahead of time where they kept their soda machine. Once I’d set up my easel and drawing board in the room set aside for the session, the nice young officer took me all the way down to one end of the building, down a flight of stairs, and through one room and out into a break room of sorts, wher
e they kept a refrigerator, sink and microwave oven. Beside the fridge was a little cardboard box where you dropped in a quarter and then you selected a soda from the refrigerator.

  Everyone just trusted that everyone else would leave their quarters—one of many reasons why I love my home state of Kansas.

  But I decided not to get a soda just then. I knew that the time would come when a fidgety little girl would need the distraction of a trip to get a soda, so I returned to the office where my equipment was and waited for Jordan Rinehart.

  When they brought her in, I thought Sara Rinehart’s daughter was one of the most beautiful little girls I had ever seen. Her hair was platinum blond and her eyes cornflower blue. Once the officers left us alone, she regarded me with serious, solemn eyes and waited to be grilled yet again.

  Instead, I said, “What a pretty dress you have on!”

  “Thank you.” Like most children that age, she was shy.

  “Have you been enjoying the summer?”

  Surprised at the question, she nodded her head.

  “I’ll bet you’ve been going to the swimming pool, haven’t you?”

  A delighted smile broke across her face and she said, “I love to go swimming!”

  “I’ll bet you do. My daughter Tiffany just loves to go swimming too; she’s like a little duck.”

  Jordan giggled, and soon, she was relaxing with me, relieved that I wasn’t going to poke and prod her about the terrible day her mother died. The fact that I was a mommy seemed to reassure her.

  We talked about her school and her favorite teacher, and eventually, I said, “We’re going to draw a picture of that yucky man.”

  She knew immediately who I meant, but I did not dwell on it. Instead, while I got out the FBI Facial Identification Catalogue and put my little towel full of pastels in my lap, I asked what her favorite part of Sunday school was and we chatted about other things.

  When the time came to begin the sketch, I found that like most children of her age who are asked to give information for a forensic sketch session, she was decisive. They will usually select a feature right away and stick to their choices, whereas an adult will, more than likely, second-guess himself and waffle back and forth. Children also have very vivid memories; they know what they saw.

  One thing that must always be remembered when dealing with a child witness is that if he or she is eight or under, they have not yet developed their verbal skills enough to produce a word from the language part of their brain to describe their attacker. The way a small child’s brain works is that the visual aid—like the FBI catalogue—sends a message to the visual cortex of the brain. This is the part of the brain that actually saw the attacker; therefore, this part of the brain then recognizes the look-alike facial feature.

  In one case, a child with whom I worked did not know what the word “moustache” meant. But he could pick out an almost exact likeness from the moustache portion of the FBI catalogue. Of course, this was not the situation with Jordan, but after we had worked for a while, I noticed she was beginning to fidget, which was perfectly normal for a six-year-old. They have short attention spans, but I was ready for it.

  “Would you like to go get a Coke?” I asked.

  With great enthusiasm, she nodded her head.

  “C’mon,” I said. “You’re gonna like this. It’s fun! We have to walk a long way through halls and rooms, but I know where to go.”

  At that, she hesitated a bit, not sure whether she should leave with me or not. But more curious and intrigued than nervous, she climbed off the chair and took my hand.

  I treated it like a grand adventure. We walked down the hall, came to a corner and peeked around like Bugs Bunny, then tippy-toed down the stairs in a silly fashion. She was giggling with me when suddenly, a big tall police officer blocked our way.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice gruff, his brows knitted, as if he just could not figure out what a woman and a kid were doing in his territory.

  Keeping my voice happy, like we were departing for Disneyland, I said, “We’re going on a trip to get a soda from the refrigerator. We like going down halls and through rooms, because we’ve never been here before.”

  He met my eyes. I was absolutely not going to lapse into copspeak and say something like, We’re here doing the forensic sketch on the Sara Rinehart bludgeoning murder.

  It was my sincere hope that this guy would figure out that a woman in a white silk dress and a little girl were not there to lay siege to his department.

  He glanced down at Jordan, then smiled and let us pass.

  Jordan absolutely loved it.

  She seemed to feel protected by me, the big grown-up lady who acted like she was in charge and didn’t let the big scary cop push her around. It was an adventure unlike anything she’d experienced before, and it was fun.

  I’d brought quarters, and we carefully dropped in two. Jordan selected one soda and so did I, then we headed back down the labyrinth toward the task that awaited us.

  Once we were settled back in the room where I was to do the sketches and sipping our sodas, Jordan was all business. First, from the book I showed her, she picked a hairstyle that was very unruly, curly dark long hair. Then, she told me the guy’s eyes were a really light blue and when we were working on the nose, she selected nostrils that were almost perfectly round.

  Both of these features are highly unusual. I wondered when she showed me the nostrils if maybe Jordan just thought the nostrils were perfectly round because, as a child, she was looking up at them. But I found her to be very serious and thoughtful—much more so than any six-year-old witness I’d ever worked with before. She was possessed of a certain earnest intensity unlike what I’d seen in other child witnesses. I could tell that she sincerely wanted to accomplish the task of drawing the face of the man who’d attacked her mother.

  When it was time to work with her friend Ashley, the session was quite different. She could not concentrate like Jordan had, and I was unable to get her to focus for very long on the catalogue. But I did notice that, like Jordan, she, too, chose the perfectly round nostrils and the very light blue eyes.

  When I showed her the sketch, she said, “That looks like him.”

  Now it was up to the detectives.

  For the family of Sara Rinehart, a nightmarish day in May spilled into a hellish summer, and as the weeks went on and on, they stood by helplessly and watched as the Newton police seemed to focus only on the theory that Robby Nachlinger did it.

  “I was really looking forward to having Sarah’s murder solved in the first week to ten days,” David Guzman, Sarah’s father, told a Newton Kansan reporter. “I called home every night expecting to hear…but when our son-in-law was accused, it was guilty until proven innocent.”

  And if that accusation, alone, was all there was to it, that would have been painful enough.

  But people talked.

  Small towns thrive on gossip; it’s a form of soap-opera entertainment. People who are born and raised in a community and stay or return after college to raise their own families there, often compete to see who can be first to say, “Did you hear what happened to so-and-so?”

  A few, particularly those who are largely housebound or who live extremely insular lives, like to get caught up in the drama, burning up the telephone lines for hours discussing the lives of others. Maybe it makes their own lives seem tame in comparison, or maybe they like the attention, but a scandalous situation like this—violent murder, cops suspect family member—can fuel the fires for months.

  Those who knew, loved, and respected the Guzman and Rinehart families never bought into the police theory about Robby Nachlinger. They felt the same heartache and frustration as the family did, burning for justice, wondering if it was ever going to come. Their loving support kept the family going.

  But those who didn’t know the family or didn’t know them well, did wonder about Robby. After all, some thought, the police wouldn’t have suspected him if they didn�
�t have good reason. They must be onto something.

  Perhaps it made them feel safer to go along with the police theory, because then they wouldn’t have had to worry about a stranger, a monster, invading their own homes some day and snatching away one of their own loved ones.

  But the Rinehart and Guzman families worried about it. They worried about it a great deal. They felt that every day, every week, every month the police wasted chasing down the rabbit hole of investigating Robby Nachlinger, someone else was at risk.

  For Heidi Guzman, Sarah’s little sister, it was unconscionable. Like Sarah, Heidi was a spunky beauty—blonde, blue-eyed, full of energy and outrage. Heidi worked at a mental health facility with troubled, at-risk teenagers, and she had a keen understanding of human psychology.

  She also refused to take “no” for an answer. Day and night, Heidi hounded the police. At least two or three times a week, she phoned the department, looking for information.

  “There’s a halfway house in that neighborhood,” she would point out. “Has anybody checked out that halfway house?”

  “We’re doing everything we can, ma’am,” they would say.

  “What about the sunglasses you guys found under my sister’s bed?” she’d demand. “They don’t belong to anybody we know, and they darn sure don’t belong to my brother-in-law.”

  “The KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) is going over everything with a fine-toothed comb,” they’d say, in a hurry to get rid of her.

  Later, she said, “They were putting all their time and resources and energy into investigating Opie Taylor!”

  A miserable summer wept into a bleak autumn and Heidi kept begging the police to widen their investigation.

  “We’re doing all we can,” they said.

  Autumn creaked into a cold, dead winter, and winter bled into spring and the first anniversary of Sarah Rinehart’s death came and went. Newspapers wrote follow-up articles and reprinted copies of my sketch, but nothing came of the articles or my sketch. A $10,000 reward was posted.