The Grim Sleeper by Christine Pelisek

Author:Christine Pelisek
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: True Crime
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

More Dead Ends

The 800 Task Force detectives were not yet finished investigating members of the Cosmopolitan Church. The day before my “Grim Sleeper Returns” story appeared, detectives Rod Amador and Paul Coulter flew to Macon, Georgia, to interview Bishop F. P. Matthews. The charismatic preacher left the Cosmopolitan Church in the late ’80s and continued his work in Georgia. He claimed to have a large following around the world and was known in some circles as God’s Miracle Man. In his sermons, he said he was a prophet who had been raised from the dead five times.

Matthews was surprised to see the detectives, who showed up unexpectedly at his large two-story home outside of Macon, but he agreed to answer Amador and Coulter’s questions about the Cosmopolitan Church. Matthews informed the detectives that his close friend, Pastor Owen Malone, also a church minister at the Cosmopolitan Church, was interred in a five-foot-high and three-foot-wide concrete crypt in the front yard of the home. The detectives’ interest in Malone was piqued when Matthews told them that before he died, in April of 2007 at 74, Malone occasionally returned to Los Angeles. If Malone was the killer, that might account for the long break between the murders.

As unsavory as the idea was, the detectives knew they had to get a DNA sample from Pastor Malone to rule him out. Once back in L.A., Coulter contacted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and wrote up an affidavit to take a DNA sample from Malone’s remains. He and another detective returned to Georgia and were there when the mortuary popped the seal on the crypt and rolled out the casket. The crypt was taken to the local medical examiner, who removed the femur and jaw bone from Malone. Inside Malone’s casket was a little tin box. When the medical examiner picked it up, it rattled.

Could it be the .25-caliber pistol? the detectives wondered. Coulter immediately called Kilcoyne. For a moment the detectives’ hopes were up, only to be dashed, again. The rattle in the box turned out to be from the collar of Malone’s dog. The dog had died within a few days of his master and had been cremated.

The 800 Task Force detectives sent both Bishop F. P. Matthews’s DNA and the forensic samples from Malone’s body to Spriggs’s DNA lab. Less than forty-eight hours later, the two men of God were exonerated by men of science. Neither of their DNA samples matched the human detritus the Grim Sleeper left behind.

• • •

Frustrations were mounting as suspect after suspect was ruled out when a promising lead walked right through the front door of police headquarters. A middle-aged Texas woman who arrived with her adult daughter told the front-desk clerk that she wanted to talk to a detective handling the Grim Sleeper case. In an interview room on the third floor, she told detectives Coulter and Amador she had flown from Texas to speak with the task force.

Her ex-husband was the killer, she told them.

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