Murphy Elton Brutus - Evil Season

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the following persons and organizations for their assistance during the writing of this book: Michelle Andersen; Assistant State Attorneys Lon Arend, Karen Fraivillig, and Suzanne ODonnell; production editor Robin Cook; Marcia Corbino; Gary Crowell, former employee of the Starlight Park Barber Shop; the Honorable Deno G. Economou; my agent, Jake Elwell, Stephanie Finnegan, Harold Ober Associates; Deputy Thomas M. Gilliland, Harris County (Texas) Sheriffs Office; super editor Gary Goldstein; Kay Kipling; Jeffrey C. Monk, Administrative Manager, Houston Police Department; Reedy Photoprocess, especially president Stan Reedy and longtime employees Paula Burfield and Lynn Bushner; JoAnn Smolen, at the Lynn N. Silvertooth Judicial Center; Sally A. Trout; Margaret Wood; Stanley Beishline, Sergeant Curt Holmes, Cynthia Maszak, Cheri Potts, and Sharon Wood, at the Sarasota Police Department.

And Elton Brutus Murphy.

About the Author

Originally from Rochester, New York, Michael Benson is a graduate of Hofstra University. He is the author of Betrayal in Blood, The Burn Farm, Killer Twins, Mommy Deadliest, and Watch Mommy Die. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Afterword:

A God Has Become Man

As autumn approached in 2011, Elton Brutus Murphy was the most polite murderer ever. He never failed to thank the author for the supplies he sent, or for the attention he gave.

Its been a privilege and an honor working with you. Do you already have another murderer lined up for your next book? he asked.

The answer was no. The authors next investigation was to be a reexamination of an icy cold case, a double sex murder near the authors home when he was a child.

Murphy said he was doing well. Considering where I am, he added, which was the Northwest Florida Reception Center prison facility in Chipley.

Murphy had a reason to feel good. After more than a year in prison, hed received his first visitor, his seventy-two-year-old aunt, Thelma Prance, from Cartersville, Georgiahis fathers sister.

She had not been around much when Murphy was a boy and asked him to fill in the blanks for her. What was her brotherdead now for more than twenty yearslike at that time?

Murphy told her that his dad beat his mom and aspirated on a severe drunk.

Murphys time went through a rough patch in 2010 when, after years of taking the same antianxiety, depression, and psychosis drugs, he began to have bad side effects. But eventually his meds were changed and the side effects smoothed out.

Murphy still thought in terms of how much better society would be if he were within it rather than outside it. He could be a teacher. During his life he had taught an amazing three subjects: photography, scuba diving, and hairstyling.

Some people complained of stage fright and dreaded situations where they had to speak in front of groups, but not Murphy.

Im comfortable, Murphy said, as long as I know the subject matter reasonably well.

Murphy thought it was funny, but his best friends in prison were all bank robbers. Hed always been drawn to bank robbers, all the way back to his days in the general population in the Texas jail. All of the bank robbers hed befriended had one thing in common: the guts to do it.

When I was free, I was successful at stealing small amounts of money. I never once contemplated robbing a bank, Murphy said. He recalled a day twelve years past, when he was cutting hair in a Regis shop, and one of his favorite customers came in and told him that her boyfriend just got arrested for robbing a bank. Maybe being a bank robber was a destiny that had gone unfulfilled, Murphy realized with a sigh.

After a lifetime of being in near-peak physical condition, Murphy, at age fifty-four, was letting himself go for the first time ever. I simply cant exercise to the extent that I used to, Murphy said. He injured both of his arms a while back and this hindered his ability to exercise. The guy who once did eighteen hundred push-ups in one day, while in the Leon County Jail, now could do none. When the injury occurred, it felt like the bones in his upper arms had cracked. His arms never healed, never got back to anywhere near what they used to be.

Now I mainly walk for exercise, he said.

Regrets? He had one. He hadnt raised his children in a Christian home. Hed never taught them about Jesus or taken them to church and Sunday school.

Other than that, no, not really. He was satisfied with the way his life had turned out: Ive lived a full life and Ive had many unique experiences, he said happily.

He was thankful that hed gotten away with so much before he was finally caught and put away. True, he had to pay the piper for going AWOL; but other than that, hed gotten away with a lotand without consequences.

Murphy now believed that the seed had been in him for a long time, that he was destined to do something very, very badand he had.

The seed was there, but I didnt nourish it. But he could only keep Mr. Hyde caged in Dr. Jekylls psyche for so long. Something had to give. If Id nourished it, I probably would have become a serial killer.

He would admit it now. When he did finally kill, it was such a rush. Big-time thrill. And it stayed in his mind vividly, like a movie that he could play for himself inside his head, again and again.

After the kill, during my time in the Texas state jail, all I thought about and planned for was my next kill. I was hooked on murder. I was a murder junkie, he said. I tried it one time and I was destined to do it again and again, until I was stopped.

He felt absolutely no remorse for the kill. No guilt! To this day he still felt no remorse for the murder and mutilation of Joyce Wishart.

I do, however, have feelings for the family, Murphy quickly added. He remembered them in his daily prayers.

I also have regrets about not putting my own family first when planning the murder. He hadnt completely thought through the possibility that he could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was sorry for the hardship and pain his act caused Dean, and ex-wife Paula and the kids. I neglected my own family in pursuit of pleasure, he said, even though the murder was a result of my extreme schizophrenic promptings.

During the act there was extreme pleasure, he said, but that didnt change the fact that the murder was a manifestation of his complete psychological breakdown.

He did feel like there was injustice in his spending his remaining years in prison. What should have happened was he should have been committed to Chattahoochee for a few years, give the shrinks a chance to get his meds right so that sanity returned, and then hed be good to go.

Murphy knew his own mind better than anyone else would, and he could vouch for the fact that hed been normal since 2008. No hallucinations, no paranoia, no grandiose feelings of being God. All of that was before 2008.

Prison, however, was his destiny. If nothing else, hed become a man of routinea man who lived life at a lackadaisical pace, day after day, week after week, all very much the same.

He woke up at four-thirty in the morning when the lights went on, shaved, brushed his teeth, and prayed for his extended family and others. After prayer he read the Bible, two to four pages, which always offered him pleasure and comfort. On April 18, 2011, he completed reading the entire Bible for the first time. He immediately went back to Genesis and started reading again.