You Have a Very Soft Voice Susan: Read This Excerpt of Susan Fensten’s Twisted and Surreal Case of Stalking

PROLOGUE

I’VE SEEN WHERE YOU LIVE, I KNOW WHAT YOU EAT

A tremor went down my spine the day I heard that Leonard was planning to sell his ranch-style house in the New Jersey suburbs and move to my neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a gray, chilly spring day, fittingly gloomy. The dank weather compounded my mood and lent itself to a scene from a grainy noir movie, dilapidated factories in stages of decomposition everywhere that he could hide, stash a weapon, stash a body. Stash me.

It seemed that Leonard thought a loft might better suit his lifestyle. Leonard, the schizophrenic child math prodigy, who had blossomed into a wealthy swinger, painter, and collector of sexual paraphernalia. This wasn’t a good sign since his present residence had apparently been suitably outfitted for his bacchanals for quite some time. He claimed he wanted something bigger, hipper, something located in an area where he wouldn’t stand out quite as much from his cookie cutter neighbors in New Jersey. But I knew that wasn’t it. His wealth could have easily afforded him lofts in SoHo, Tribeca, or Chelsea—all within striking distance of the downtown dungeons and secret after-hours places. The real attraction for him was his new “cousin Susan.” Was he intent on intensifying the deviant nature of his parties with me as his guest of honor?

I’d never met Leonard, but I knew a lot about him. I knew that he had been charged but never convicted of rape and kidnapping. I knew that he had a lavish psychiatric history and that he often went off his meds and had been repeatedly hospitalized. His doctors had decided that he wasmentally competent for release. He had been able to keep down his Wall Street job, at least well enough to amass a fortune. Leonard had the knack of appearing so normal at times, so non-descript. If he wanted to, he could look like an ordinary person. He was just an ordinary person, one who just happened to be obsessed with me.

I fearfully imagined him dazed, wandering the streets searching for me. The area could readily conceal someone like Leonard by virtue of the eclectic mix of people it attracted. Much to the chagrin of natives and old timers, the “weird folk” had moved in and found that it suited their alternate lifestyles all too well. Williamsburg. It was a forgotten New York neighborhood with exotic, dark alleys; a Mecca for artists, musicians, yuppies, skinheads, and those of the tattooed persuasion. The hulking smokestack of the Domino Sugar factory belched out an aroma of burned brown sugar that draped everything with a sweet, invisible mist. It was a hipster zone, where a chameleon like Leonard could crawl unobtrusively from building to building, from playground to lounge. Leonard, a master of stealth to begin with, might find that Williamsburg rendered his avant-garde lifestyle and morbid moods virtually invisible.

Early spring in New York City can be depressing, and the gloomy weekend served only to fuel my imagination as my mind’s eye saw Leonard examining lofts and surveying the neighborhood. He was near, possibly peering through the window from the back seat of a Town Car as it rolled past clothing stores, cafes, delis, a subway stop, the Salvation Army, the Domino sugar factory. He was examining the landscape, beads of water sliding from the glass to the shiny black exterior of the car. These images sliced through my mind like sharp, piercing screams. Had he come to the conclusion that all Williamsburg residents were creatures of darkness and decay? Or was it just me? Did he believe that I was a perfect match for the side of his personality never seen by his Wall Street clients? Did he picture me in his harness?

The cold gray rain made me feel only more desolate.

It wasn’t long after Leonard’s trip to Brooklyn that he let his observations be known by updating his Yahoo! profile. It now featured a graphic close-up photo of a vagina tattooed with a fanged red devil, a shiny metal earring piercing the clitoris. He knew I would see it. He knew he had scared me so much I couldn’t stop looking. On his new profile, below a list of his favorite torture and rape websites was a taunting poem:

Dear cousin, my cousin, Oh cousin so sweet.

I’ve seen where you live, I know what you eat.

I want to see your eyes when we first meet.

He was getting closer, I could feel it. He was emerging from my email inbox, coming out into the real world, my world. He was going to get a closer look at me, see me on the street, go by my house, and run a finger along the gate. And I had nowhere to go.

CHAPTER ONE

INFORMATION NOT RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC

Murderers are not monsters, they’re men.

And that’s the most frightening thing about them.

—Alice Sebold

After an hour of questioning and getting nowhere, one of the detectives pulled out a photograph. He looked at it, placed it on the table, and with his index finger, slid it toward me across the metal desk. My heart constricted like a convulsion of sharp pins. Fearing it might be a crime scene photo I braced myself. But then I recognized it immediately, it was a simple color photo of Jennifer Whipkey in life, one of two images that I had seen in internet news reports about her murder. Her beaming face seemed to hover ghostlike above the cold steel desk, lying in front of me, looking at me. A presence that was chillingly real. Her cheerful expression was frozen in time. The atmosphere in the blue lit room felt like a morgue. A mere one hundred pounds, she perished under a frenzy of sixty-three stab wounds.

Feeling helpless, I thought of her young child, motherless, like my nephew when my sister died. Death and sorrow—my uninvited twin companions, the feeling was always the same—my soul touching the third rail. I wondered what the detectives thought of me. They seemed like any other overworked cops following up on leads and hitting dead ends three years and counting. Could they really hold suspicions that I was connected to murder? Or were they hoping for just a shred of detail that could point them in the right direction and spring the case back to life? I told them that I felt horrible about her death, about the nature of this extremely violent crime, and how terrifying it must have been for her. That I had heartfelt sympathy for what her family was going through. I knew all about how the violent death of a young woman decimates the surviving family. My words felt futile. I wished that there something I could do to help them, but I knew nothing.

The meeting was long and unsettling. It was obvious they really wanted to solve this case which almost seemed personal for them. They had to answer to her family and her community. Their labor, frustration, and emotion were coming through in their questions about my life, my social life, how I came to know about Jennifer Whipkey’s murder. The killing wasn’t highly publicized outside of the small New Jersey Township of West Deptford. They wanted to know why I had information about a crime that wasn’t made public. Of course it would draw the immediate attention of homicide detectives; that was completely understandable. But I was far removed from the terrifying deed and had only been pulled in by a net of lies as complex as a spider’s web.

When it concluded, I thanked Special Agent Waller. I had the feeling I would be seeing him again very soon.

I was escorted to the elevator by another FBI official. I passed once again through multiple security checkpoints, each time fishing out ID from my wallet. All the while I reflected back in hopes of finding some sense in it all, while at the same point realizing that there are some things in this world that will never make any sense, things that you are forced to accept. Like actions with no reason or purpose, minds without conscience. In the thick glass that seemed to be everywhere, I caught a glimpse of my transparent reflection. It was still me, at least I looked the same, which surprised me as my life had been bluntly interrupted and thrown around like rag doll. I waved ‘thanks’ to the last security guard who buzzed me out and pushed through the revolving door. Out into the financial district, the city sunlight and street noise brought me back to normalcy. My town, New York City; ever moving along, never stopping, and reverberating in a million directions. It reinvigorated me.

It was a relief to re-join the ordinary world. I had emerged from the underworld, an ‘other’ realm, an unpretty world where bodies washed of their evidence are posed in caked puddles of blood. A world of chaos and order where square-shouldered law enforcement personnel dutifully knocked on doors, chased down witnesses, and presented evidence to prosecutors. Most of the time they wrapped up their cases, but tragically sometimes not, moving on to the next one in a ceaseless cycle of reward and frustration. I was left with the indelible knowledge that there were butcherers traveling the highways and lurking in back yards never to be found. Maybe even in my own backyard.

At the core of this saga is the reason I was here in the first place. This very strange thing that I had encountered had affected me in ways I could not have imagined. It had been almost two years since this all began in 2003, like a carnival of cracked mirrors with a quicksand floor with phantoms reflected in the distorted glass. I had to shake off these images and get back to my desk at Rizzoli International Publications just a few stops away at 22nd Street and Park Avenue South. I had missed enough time already.

My life started out unsheltered, I was spared little in the bad old days of New York, but it was now all about books and publishers, authors, tours, media lists, and high expectations. A book publicist is essentially a salesman, a pitchman with an idea clutching a roster of ambitious authors and anxious editors. It’s at times a waltz on a high wire, at others glamorous, yet bone-grinding hard work. I hopped on the uptown subway immersed in a reel of thoughts of how I came to be exhaustively questioned by two New Jersey Homicide Detectives at One Federal Plaza, FBI Headquarters in New York City.

How did I get here? How did an otherwise normal everyday New Yorker who did not operate in the world of crime, wind up at FBI headquarters in downtown Manhattan now being vigorously interrogated about an unsolved brutal murder?

Featured image: Philipp Katzenberger / Unsplash