Free The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Page A

while taking good care of his son, was also gambling away his trust fund in the stock market. Lewis lost more than a hundred thousand dollars in 1995 alone. Police speculated that Lewis, desperate and running out of money, killed his son, buried his body in the Vermont woods, and then set fire to the New Jersey house in an attempt to cover his tracks before he fled the country. Spitzer’s brother told police a pilot was scheduled to pick up Lewis Cutler a day after the fire and fly him to the Caribbean. But something clearly went terribly wrong for the two men inside the burning house.
    Six months after Carol’s tip to the Vermont State Police led to Sean’s identification, Carol attended Sean’s memorial ceremony in upstate New York. A woman who identified herself as one of Sean’s aunts approached her. “What you did made it possible for all of us to be here today,” she told Carol.
    Harkness, who during his search for his cousin had become a follower of the Doe Network, persuaded Carol to join the group. She perused it daily, over time joining its administrative board and helping vet other members’ matches.
    Carol still hadn’t accomplished what she had set out to do: find herex-husband.
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    In 2008, four years after Sean Cutler’s memorial service, Todd Smith’s sister phoned Carol. “Are you sitting down?” she asked her former sister-in-law.
    â€œHe drowned,” she told Carol. “They found him in the ocean at Daytona Beach, and he had flippers and a flashlight.”
    Carol felt her heart in her throat. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
    On the Doe Network, she had come across a listing for a young man wearing flippers whom she had once considered a match for Todd. But too much didn’t line up. For one thing, his age was cited as somewhere between eleven and twenty; Todd Smith was twenty-five. The dead man’s eye color was gray; Todd’s was bright blue. But the real deal-breaker, as far as Carol was concerned, was that the dead man had been found in the water. Todd wasn’t keen on the beach and never swam in the ocean, even on summer family trips to Martha’s Vineyard. “If this Doe was found on a golf course with a nine iron, I would have jumped on it, but the flippers and the flashlight? It made no sense,” Carol said later.
    On May 18, 1989, on the 300 block of South Ocean Beach in Daytona Beach the day after Todd left New Jersey, witnesses reported a man struggling in the water. Rescuers were unable to locate him, even with the use of a helicopter. His body washed ashore early the next morning.
    Nineteen years later, scrolling through the Doe Network’s listings for missing men, a forensic technician in Volusia County, Florida, working her way through the county’s cold cases spotted a report for a tall man, over six feet, with curly hair. She scanned a poster showing Todd Smith in a tux at his wedding; a second photo of him with a trim little mustache; a third in which he was clean-shaven in a plaid shirt and oversized pink-tinted sunglasses. She looked at all four photos—the postmortem photo of a drowning victim who had never been identified, the ones online, the dates, and the description: white male, eleven to twenty years old, over six feet, 175 pounds. Greenish/gray eyes, curly brown/blond hair. White-and-black patterned swim trunks; on his left wrist was a diver’s flashlight on a strap; swimming flippers were on his feet. Mustache; circumcised; a two-inchsurgical scar on the left lateral chest.
    Todd’s missing-person report listed him as six-three, 160 pounds, dark blond curly hair, blue eyes, with a small scar on his neck. The age, eye color, and scars didn’t jibe, but still she said to herself, That’s my John Doe.
    She sent New Jersey police a fingerprint from the body. The prints pulled off Smith’s car were confusing; the cops were never certain which were his. But the drowning