Who Killed the Cheerleader?
A New Tale by Arbogast
Who killed the cheerleader?
The words ran through my mind like a coked-out teenager with the world’s nastiest pair of scissors. There was going to be blood, I thought. Dino promised blood and guts.
I put the kid to bed at eight. The wife proved harder to deal with. She admitted to being horny for the first time in six months, and as much as I wanted to take advantage of the rare moistening of our wedding cake, I had to say “no” and tighten the screws on my own chastity belt. Dino Carelli was the kind of dude to declare war over tardiness, and I didn’t feel much like fighting.
“I’m sorry, sugar,” I said. “I’ll be back before midnight if you’re willing to wait.” Her response was to call me a cuckold and Mr. Freeze, but notably, she did not turn down my offer. I reiterated this fact (or rather lie) to myself as I threw on my coat and headed to the bar.
Cavender’s Last Resort was dead. Even in the best of times, the grungy bar looked like a mausoleum, but when the crowd consisted of one or two drunks, the place seemed truly sepulchral. I found Dino hunched over a nearly full glass of beer. I slid in next to him and ordered a whisky sour.
“Get a beer instead,” Dino grumbled. I looked at the wizened bartender and saw that he concurred with Dino’s opinion.
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever you have on draft.”
“Just get a fucking Bismarck. Give my friend here a Bismarck, Harry.” The bartender, whom I presumed was named Harry, deftly hoisted a glass and filled it with straw-colored lager. He put the glass in front of me. I reached into my back pocket, but Dino’s cracked-skin forepaw stopped me.
“Just put that one on my tab, Harry. You’ve got a two-drink limit.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make sure to imbibe nice and slow.”
“You fuck. ‘Imbibe.’ What the shit is that? You think someone like Harry even knows what that word means?” I studied Dino for a second. He was earnest and only a little offended.
“Gee, Dino. It’s a word like everything else in the dictionary. And I wasn’t talking to Harry; I was talking to you, and you know what it means. You’re a writer after all.”
“Former writer as of today, my friend. The Daily News gave me my walking papers this afternoon.” Dino drank the entirety of his beer and asked Harry for another. The fresh Bismarck came quickly, and within seconds, half of it was down Dino’s gullet. “A lifetime of blood and ink,” he said. “It hurts, and what makes it hurt even more is that they’re replacing me with a dog.”
I stared at my friend with a look somewhere between bemusement and horror.
“Yeah, a dog. Not a real dog. No, that would be something. I’d clap for that. Can you imagine it? A pooch that does journalism. Yeah, that would be something. But instead, it’s a new AI mascot that the bozos are trotting out as a way to mollify the purists who aren’t too keen on AI writers replacing real reporters.”
“That sucks, Dino,” I offered. It felt weak coming out of my lips, but I felt that I had to say something. The older man nodded in appreciation.
“Kid,” he said while looking directly into my eyes, “I only regret one thing in life, and writing ain’t it. Sure, it’s not an easy job, and like old Fredric Brown, I avoid making words until I absolutely have to, but I still love it.”
“Is this a roundabout way of giving me a pep talk?” I asked with a snicker breaking through. Dino gave me a grimace before cracking a smile himself.
“Whatever,” he said. “Just don’t give up writing, kid. The world is going to throw you a lot of curveballs. Hell, you’re living with the ultimate curveball.”
“My wife?”
“Yeah, kid. Your wife and women in general. I’ll bet she even tells you that she likes your writing, right?”
“Sharon has offered a few compliments in the past, yes.” I tried hard, but the uncertainty was obvious in my voice. Dino pounced on it like a tiger.
“She either hates your stuff or, more likely, doesn’t care at all. You’re trying to be a sci-fi novelist, right?”
I nodded.
“Unless your wife is a big one, she doesn’t like sci-fi. No skinny woman likes sci-fi. Your intended audience is young men, foreigners, and fat housewives. Remember that, and you’ll go places.”
“Cheers.” We clinked glasses and then fell into a comfortable silence. Dino focused on his beer while I looked out the grimy windows and saw the first flurries of yet another North Dakota snowfall. Three men with buzzcuts walked into the bar, temporarily bringing the cold in with them. Even in civilian clothes, I could tell that they were airmen.
“So,” I said with my back still to Dino, “who killed the cheerleader?” I slowly turned around, expecting to see the ex-crime reporter, hot and bothered. Instead, a hangdog face wrapped in olive skin greeted me.
“The cheerleader? She had a name, kid. A name like ‘Dino,’ and a name like your own. Olga Hammerlick. Not very pretty, I’ll grant you that, but I’ve found in my many travels that the prettiest girls often have the ugliest names. And she was pretty; you’ve seen the pictures.”
I nodded. The murder of Olga Hammerlick, unsolved since 1974, was Dino’s favorite subject. Every picture I had ever seen of her showed a young woman with tall, lean, and shapely legs and a pair of firm and supple breasts. Her most publicized photo, which came courtesy of the Minot public school system, showed a big, toothy smile that almost reached her earlobes. Even in black and white, Olga’s cornflower blue eyes were piercing.
The other photos, the ones that Dino started sharing with me a year prior, were less flattering to the poor girl. These ones were also black and white, and they showed a naked Olga splayed along the transept before the altar. The ones from faraway weren’t too bad, but the up-close ones that Dino had smuggled out of the Daily News archives showed not just Olga’s throat (which had turned purple due to ligature marks, with ragged scars crisscrossing her trachea), but also the back of her head. There, where the occipital bone met the parietal bone, an ice pick with a broken handle rested hungrily with dried blood oozing out of both sides. They were horrific pictures, the kind of pictures that have a nasty way of reappearing during sleep.
For Dino, these pictures were more familiar than any spouse could ever be. He had lived with them since that October night. I knew the whole story up and down: Olga Hammerlick’s body was found just before dawn on October 12, 1974, by a Minot State cop named Eric Szmyt. The crime scene was located inside the Lutheran ministry on campus. A later autopsy put the time of death somewhere between midnight and 2:45 a.m. Cause of death: strangulation. There had been a series of post-mortem assaults by the killer. The ice pick was the most obvious, but Olga’s hands had been arranged across her chest, and, most dreadful of all, one of the church’s candles had been inserted into her vagina. There was no definitive proof of sexual molestation, but Dino held fast to the theory that the killer assaulted Olga immediately after her death.
Dino had been the first newsman on the scene. Back then, Dino Carelli was a wannabe Cronkite with a tour of South Vietnam under his belt. A thick New Jersey accent made a career in broadcasting out of the question, so Dino had turned to newspaper reportage. He was two years in when he broke the Hammerlick murder to the Minot public. It was his first murder story. The case made Dino the star crime reporter of the Upper Midwest. His articles on the murder and its investigation won awards. His best piece, which Dino wanted to call “Who Killed the Cheerleader?” was given the softer, less punchy title of “A Bitter, Cold Winter for the Hammerlicks.” The late, great Heinrich Weizler, longtime editor of the Daily News and an honest-to-God saint according to Dino, had sent the article in for a Pulitzer. It didn’t win a damn thing, but Dino appreciated the gesture all the same.
“Okay,” Dino said after clearing a space at the bar. He reached underneath his stool and brought up to his lap the battered leather attaché case that he carried with him everywhere. After brushing aside his favorite martini mixer, Dino reached down and produced a series of photographs. There were three in total, and each had writing on the back. He handed me the largest picture first.
I flipped it over and read: “Eric Szymt. Twenty-five in 1974. The first to find Olga’s body. Became a suspect in late 1975 due to a records scandal at the university police. Specifically, it was proven that Officer Szymt had falsified his time reports over a period of two years. At the same time, Minot had suffered a rash of B&Es, including some that involved sexual assault. When a victim’s composite sketch came back looking like Officer Szymt, he was relieved of duty. Current whereabouts are unknown.”
I flipped the photograph over and took a minute to look at Officer Eric Szymt. He had a fleshy moon face and a thick brown mustache that covered his upper lip. His dark eyes were small and soulless.
Dino handed me the next picture. This one showed Byron Forsby, the most popular suspect, insofar as most Minot citizens were concerned. Forsby and Olga were an item until Christmastime 1973. Olga was responsible for ending things, and everyone familiar with the couple agreed that Forsby did not take the news well. The formerly straight-A student started skipping class and experimenting with hard drugs. His pristine arrest record began to gather dirt as Forsby earned convictions for trespassing, resisting arrest, and multiple shoplifting incidents. By October 1974, Forsby was a dropout, a sometime oil field worker, and a kid going nowhere fast. His good looks belied his rotten and tortured soul. It was easy for the majority to see him as the killer because he had the most obvious motivation. Dino thought that the idea was bunk.
When Dino handed me the third and final picture, I fully expected to see Warren Youngbear’s snarling face. A Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Youngbear was a violent alcoholic who spent more time in jail than out of it. I knew that Youngbear had not been a suspect in 1974. Indeed, he was not named until way later in 1989, when he managed to kill himself in an Arizona jail. That one murder in Phoenix got linked to another one in New Mexico, and by the time the calendar hit 1991, Warren Youngbear was officially labeled a serial killer—the slayer of eight women.
Dino never liked the Youngbear angle. To him, it was too easy to work backward and say: Of course, the guy who became a serial killer over a decade later killed Olga Hammerlick. It’s obvious, duh! No, Dino refused this idea, and whenever I would offer my two cents in favor of Youngbear as the killer, he would shoot me down with two prescient facts: 1) Youngbear’s victims were always prostitutes, and 2) Youngbear exclusively killed other Native women. Olga Hammerlick is not a match, Dino would say.
Instead of Warren Youngbear, Dino, with his elbows resting on the worn wood of Cavender’s Last Resort, surprised me with a new picture. I took the black-and-white photo. It showed a man in his late twenties, with long sideburns, a shaggy head of dark hair, and haunted eyes.
“Meet Lawrence G. Gunderson. Minot State, class of ‘74. A Vietnam vet who was in country between 1969 and 1970, Gunderson was still serving in the Air Force Reserve in October ‘74. When not studying mathematics, our friend Gunderson was working part-time for the university. He had himself a nice little work-study gig as handyman for State. Look at this.”
Dino handed me a Xeroxed sheet of paper listing a series of dates, times, and comments. I read a few of them but remained mystified.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“That is a record of every maintenance callout received between October 1 and October 12, 1974. Look down and count every time you see the letters’ M.C.’”
I did as Dino asked. “Eighteen,” I said.
“Those initials stand for ‘Memorial Chapel,’ and in case you don’t know, that’s what we old timers used to call the Lutheran ministry.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Dino continued. “Our boy knew the church like the back of his hand, and as you can see, he was there the afternoon of the murder. Wouldn’t be crazy to think Gunderson had a key too.”
“It’s evidence, but not damning evidence,” I said. “All it shows is that Gunderson had easy access to the church. Others did too. Didn’t one of the priests get a grilling way back when?”
Dino looked down and shook his head. “Father Varner. They really hounded him. The county police fingered him as their favorite suspect, and as a result, nearly drove the man to an early grave. I had the misfortune of watching Father Varner age prematurely thanks to the monomania of the late and lamentable Sheriff Glutz.”
“Glutz,” I said. “What an awful name.”
“Wasn’t much better as a person either. Back to Gunderson. Besides being a handyman with easy access to the crime scene, Gunderson was also attached to the Fifth Bomb Wing out at the base. Nothing suspicious there, you might say.”
I nodded again and asked for another drink. I was already over my two-drink limit, but Dino wasn’t interested in stopping me.
“However, our friend Gunderson got in a spot of trouble in 1974 with his command. Seems that he and a pal were caught with grass on base, and worse yet, back on the civilian side of the line, a local hood named Dwight Fritch sang like a canary to the city police about a peculiar drug gang controlled at the very top by two airmen.”
“Gunderson and his friend?”
“Bingo. Fritch’s initial report is in here somewhere.” Dino dug around in his attaché case for a minute, rattling his silver mixer back and forth. He eventually pulled out a crumpled piece of paper that I found only half legible.
“I’ll fill you in on the details,” he said. “Fritch claimed that the Minot drug ring specialized in weed and whores but was also quite proficient in using the air base to smuggle in China white from Southeast Asia. The city police linked up with CID in the last days in Saigon, and bam: a series of arrests was made in the summer of ‘74. Fritch also let it be known that the Minot gang had a thing for German shepherds and black clothing. That may sound unimportant to you, but let it be known that Gunderson’s friend and reputed leader of the organization was John Carr. Sound familiar?”
“Nope.”
“John Carr, brother of Michael Carr and son of Sam Carr?”
“Still nothing,” I said with a shrug.
“You’ve got to learn to pay attention to the little clues, kid. I said, ‘Son of Sam Carr.’ Alarm bells should have gone off right then and there. You see, John Carr made Minot his home until he killed himself in 1977. Before that, he lived over near my neck of the woods in Yonkers. That’s in New York, in case they don’t teach you cornhuskers geography.”
“Hilarious, Dago Dino.”
“Ey, watch it. Anyway, the Carrs had a kooky next-door neighbor in Yonkers. You may have heard the name before: David Berkowitz.”
A little bit of Bismarck spilled on the counter when I fumbled the glass. “Berkowitz? The Son of Sam killer? Oh…wait…Son of Sam…Carr?”
“Took you long enough,” Dino smirked. “I’ve got the truth now, and it only took what, over fifty years?”
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Gunderson knew a guy who lived next door to a future serial killer. How does that make him a murderer?”
“It goes back to Fritch, and what Fritch told interrogators was echoed by Berkowitz himself after he found religion. John Carr’s drug ring was about more than money. He was nuts about Lucifer. Carr and his cronies lived for sacrilege, and most of the time, the victims were their own dogs. But, if you read enough of the Daily News on microfiche, you’ll notice an alarming number of missing girls reported between ‘73 and ‘77. The really hopping years were between ‘73 and ‘74, I’ll add. And,” here Dino ducked down in his seat a little and looked over his shoulder, “you know what the cops found on Gunderson the night they brought him in for questioning after the Fritch fiasco?”
“An ice pick?” I joked.
“Nope, candles. The freak had a pocketful of candles.”
“Maybe the light company had cut his power that night.” Dino put down his empty glass and scowled.
“Okay, wiseass. Here’s my ace.” He reached into his wallet and produced a small slip of paper folded four times. I opened it and saw that it was a lab report from a company called Leary Diagnostics.
“I had my last friend on the force pour through the Hammerlick file for anything that could be used for a DNA sample. He found something, and I sent that something off to Leary. It came back positive.”
“Positive for what?” I asked.
“Dog hair. Most likely match: a German shepherd.