Free The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo Page B

Hamlet fretted and delayed avenging his father’s murder because he was a conflicted, skeptical modern man. “As it happens, Hamlet is quite psychopathically brilliant, and plays the fool while passively controlling all the action in the play until his final revenge. I would have done it exactly the same way!”
    In 1975, after a job as a clinical psychologist at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles fell through, he worked for a time at the Los Angeles County morgue under medical examiner Thomas Noguchi, who had handled the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, John Belushi, Robert F. Kennedy, and Sharon Tate.
    To be able to study hundreds of bodies, to immerse himself in the awful ways people die and are killed, he had to remain stoic, in total control of his emotions. One morning, he got a phone call with news—his father had died. He hung up and got dressed, put on his tie, and went to work. He went to a meeting on schedule. During a break from the meeting, out of the blue, a woman asked what his father did for a living. Walter said evenly, “Oh, he died.” She was taken back. “I’m so sorry. When?” He answered calmly, “This morning, about two hours ago.” They all finished the meeting. He went back to his desk in the lab. That night, he looked in the mirror and was shaken by the cold eyes staring back at him. He felt nothing. “That was pretty scary.”
    He learned the lesson that his mentors in criminal investigation would later drill into his brain: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
    Walter began to obsessively collect antiques, grand, beautiful pieces from nineteenth-century France and China, “to remind myself there are beautiful things in the world.”
    But he was hooked by the gory world of the morgue. He decided to spurn the more prestigious field of clinical psychology to become a prison psychologist. “There is high snobbery in the psychological world, and prisons are supposed to attract the dullest, the biggest drones, the most stupid,” he said. “That may or may not be true, but I’m going to do what I want, what is most fun for me, what satisfies my needs. Listening to neurotic housewives discuss their cats’ puberty won’t do it for me.”
    In May 1978, he took a job in the frozen Upper Peninsula of Michigan as a psychologist at the old prison at Marquette, a Romanesque castle on Lake Superior with five-foot-thick stone walls. The castle housed all the most violent prisoners in Michigan in one place.
    Winter had eight hours of daylight and fourteen feet of snow. For recreation, locals sat in a lakefront restaurant eating Cornish meat pies and watching the towering shards of lake ice break up as iron freighters came and went. Walter thought he had never seen such a gloomy, desolate place in his life.
    The warden gave him his schedule. Each day he would see six appointments. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, sadists, and serial killers. Men whose crimes had landed them in prison, and whose crimes in other prisons—stabbing a guard, gouging out a fellow inmate’s eye with a spoon, leading a riot—had landed them in the toughest prison of all.
    They’d mostly be psychopaths, far more cunning than Wall Street lawyers. They would try to charm, beguile, or frighten him. They would try to convince him they’d found Jesus; threaten to strangle him, cut out his heart and piss on it, eat his kidneys. They’d tried to shock him: The man who’d stapled his children’s eyelids open, then urinated into them. The repeat child molesters who preyed on hundreds. Plato said that there were only a few ways to do good, but countless ways to do evil. He would hear all of them.
    He would take it all in with a cold stare. His job was to judge whether a man was irredeemable, filled with demons that were a