Florida is a sunny place. You’ve got your rich Republicans on the Gulf Coast, especially down around Sarasota and Naples, the Tampa Mafia north of them, your rich New York Democrats wintering along the East Coast, families of all sorts hunkered down at Disney World, Cubans and Haitians in Miami, the Beautiful People a few miles and several light-years away on South Beach, native Florida “crackers” hiding out from the tourists and everyone else in the stark interior, and old, old folks everywhere, especially in St. Petersburg. Then you’ve got your UFAPs, your unlawful-flight-to-avoid-prosecution types, because that’s something else that Florida is: a great place for fugitives on the run.
Think about it: the weather is mostly warm if you have to sleep out on the street or in a tent, as folks on the lam often do, and there’s a lot of work to be done—day labor, under-the-table type stuff, the kind of jobs where employers never ask for an ID and always pay in cash.
One other part of this nicely balanced ecosystem: Florida, at least back when I was working those streets, was also loaded to the gills with viewers of America’s Most Wanted. I can’t tell you how many times we entrusted some of our most vexing problem cases to host John Walsh, and I still can’t believe how many responses those brief notices generated. Sometimes it seemed as if the entire Sunshine State was working overtime for a junior crime-stoppers badge.
Case in point: Not long after I arrived in Tampa, America’s Most Wanted aired a short segment about a college professor who had gone missing not long after his wife turned up piecemeal, which is to say dismembered in a barrel. The professor’s whereabouts were unknown, but not for long. As per custom, Floridians called in by the dozens with tips, and within days the suspected murderer was identified as having recently checked into a hotel operated by the University of Tampa. That’s when I got involved, not as the case agent, but as what’s known in the Bureau as an auxiliary agent—that is, an agent from an outside FBI office who is asked to cover leads that arise from the case at hand.
I didn’t know if the supposed perpetrator taught poetry or podiatry. I had no idea whether he had sectioned his wife with a chain saw or a hacksaw—and as I would soon learn, the mode of dismemberment tells you a lot about the dismemberer. None of that was my need-to-know business. All I knew was that some guy living in a university-owned hotel was violent enough to do something like that and that it was my job to bring him in.
To that end, I first contacted university housing officials even before a search warrant had been issued and secured their cooperation by telling them if they didn’t give me the key to the guy’s room, we might be forced to bust it down. Fearing liability complications, the university also helped evacuate the rooms adjacent to the professor, which left me once again standing on the outside of a door, about to announce the FBI’s presence, and hoping that the response did not involve gunfire, knives, feral dogs, grenades, rabid armadillos, etc. This time, though, I had a partner.
As I suggested earlier, in the culture of the FBI, doing the knock-and-announce is a big deal. It’s an honor if you are allowed to assume that risk, and it’s a special honor if someone on your team wants to “go through the door” with you—especially if, as happened in this instance, that someone is your own supervisor. Fred Eschweiller always reminds me of the title character in the old Coach sitcom, which aired in the late 1980s and through most of the ’90s. Fred was truly a sweetheart of a guy and my all-time favorite supervisor. In this instance, he was making a statement; I knew that. He was telling the four backup guys on our team and by extension the entire Tampa Bureau, This woman’s okay. Fred is also a big hulk of a guy, wide as a truck and in good shape, which made for a comforting physical presence as well under the circumstance. In any event, with Fred by my side, I knocked loudly on the door and shouted, “FBI! Open up!” Getting no response, I slipped the key in the lock and threw the door open, and then the two of us, pumped with adrenaline, went charging in simultaneously and . . . got stuck. Literally stuck. Fred took up most of the door- way himself. I was wedged into the little space next to him, fairly certain my left shoulder had just been dislocated. Since our arms were wedged in with us, our weapons were useless, and the four guys behind us couldn’t exactly shoot through us if they had to return fire, which thank goodness they didn’t since our brilliant professor had chosen to hide behind his bed, in plain sight, and gave himself up even as Fred and I were wriggling our way free from our predicament.
Thank goodness that was before body cams and YouTube, because our Keystone Kops routine would have gone viral in a hurry. As it was, the official report of the professor’s arrest noted “went without incident.” Right.
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Sometimes you go through a door the awkward way as Fred Eschweiller and I did and escape without harm by sheer chance. Other times you walk through a door you wish you hadn’t opened and have trouble forgetting what you saw. That was the case with another extremely intelligent Florida felon named George Trepal. (For reasons I’ll get into later, high IQ sometimes seems to correlate all too well with violent behaviors.)
Trepal was a chemist by training, an ex-con via sentencing for manufacturing and selling amphetamines, and a card-carrying Mensa member (only people with IQs in the top 2 percent need apply). He was also a devotee of Agatha Christie novels, an ardent participant with his orthopedic surgeon wife, Diana, in “Murder Mystery Night” events, and a really, really lousy guy to have the misfortune of living anywhere near. All those qualities coalesced fatally in March of 1988 when Trepal declared war on Peggy and Parearlyn “Pye” Carr, his neighbors in rural Alturas, way up in Polk County.
The combat began almost civilly, with Trepal complaining to the county zoning board that Pye Carr was constructing an illegal apartment on his property. In fact, he was, and the project was abandoned. Trepal upped the stakes considerably, but anonymously, that July, when he sent an unsigned letter to Pye Carr that read: “YOU AND ALL YOUR SO CALLED FAMILY HAVE TWO WEEKS TO MOVE OUT OF FLORIDA FOREVER OR ELSE YOU ALL DIE. THIS IS NO JOKE.”
In October, Diana Trepal joined the fray, complaining bitterly to Peggy Carr that Pye’s son, Travis Carr, and Duane Dubberly, Peggy’s child from a previous marriage, were playing their radios way too loud. And then things started to get serious. Near the end of that month, Peggy was working her waitress job when she thought she had suffered a heart attack. By the time she got to the hospital, she told the doctor, “I feel like I’m on fire.” Before long, Travis and Duane were suffering similar symptoms, and Peggy, whose condition had seemed to have improved, was rushed back to a larger hospital in Winter Haven, now in worse shape than ever.
That’s where neurologist T. Richard Hostler finally hit on the cause: thallium, a tasteless, odorless chemical that is naturally present in the human body in trace amounts but, in quantity, relentlessly attacks muscles and nerves. Travis and Duane survived the poisoning. Peggy didn’t. Testing showed her urine contained twenty thousand times the normal load of thallium—she never had a chance.
With a dead body on its hands and a weapon, at least of sorts, the Polk County Sheriff ’s Office sent some four hundred objects from the Carr house—everything from ice cubes to homemade pickles—to a private lab for testing. Three of them, all empty Coke bottles, tested positive for thallium. This was a violation of the Federal Anti-Tampering Act of 1982 and brought the FBI into the case. The next step was to have three unopened bottles of Carr family Coca-Cola flown to the FBI lab in Quantico. All of them, it turned out, had had their caps tampered with and were laced with thallium.
And this is where Agatha Christie enters the story, for three reasons: (1) Her 1961 novel The Pale Horse is built around a series of murders accomplished with a highly accurate description of thallium and its effects. (Christie had volunteered as an apothecary’s assistant in both world wars.) (2) As noted earlier, the Trepals liked to host murder mystery dinners, not infrequently Agatha Christie themed. And (3) a Polk County detective who had gone undercover to check out George Trepal recalled seeing a copy of The Pale Horse lying on a table in the Trepal living room. Further lab testing uncovered traces of thallium in several bottles in the Trepals’ garage. And with that the case was ready to be brought to a close.
I was involved in the case by this point, too. The sheriff ’s office had asked the BSU to profile the likely killer—a profile, I should add, that proved uncannily accurate, i.e., “an intelligent white male . . . who liked to resolve conflicts without direct confrontation.” I wasn’t part of the BSU yet—that was still a year away—but I had been named Behavioral Science Unit coordinator while still serving in the Tampa Division, which gave me a close-up look at how the BSU worked and, of course, gave the people there a first look at me as well. In this instance, I helped liaise between the various law enforcement agencies involved, conducted surveillance, monitored the wiretap involving conversations between the undercover officer and Trepal, and was on hand for the arrest, not in Alturas but at the Trepals’ new home in Sebring, about forty miles to the south.
Diana Trepal met us at the door, and to my surprise—since I generally expect doctors to be civil—was profoundly loud and extremely unwelcoming. Summoned by his wife’s shouting, George Trepal appeared next, at the top of the stairs, wearing nothing but bikini briefs, in his case not a pretty sight. We suggested he get dressed while we executed our search warrant, and it was in the process of so doing that we discovered a secret room behind a pegboard hung with tools. I was the first to open the door. I no longer remember exactly what I expected to find: vials of poison, a floor littered with human bones—the mind can fly in all sorts of directions at moments like this. But what I actually found was in some ways worse: a bed fitted with manacles, Diana’s teddy, various implements of sexual torture, the pleasure-pain principle writ large and ugly. I remember thinking, When she sets a broken bone, does she give it a little extra twist, just for the sexual thrill of it?
I should add that George Trepal wasn’t the first killer to go to school on The Pale Horse. The very first year it appeared in print, a fourteen-year-old English schoolboy and mystery book fan, Graham Young, used thallium to murder his stepmother. But Trepal might have been the first to use it so indiscriminately. The Carrs, down even to their two-year-old granddaughter, were ardent consumers of Coca-Cola, and every single one of them was poisoned to one degree or another by the tainted refreshments George Trepal provided them. Even by the low standards of murderers, he was a truly awful person.
Trepal, by the way, remains on death row in Polk County.
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