Premier Edition of The Adventures of Sergeant Rusty Mulligan: The Case that didn’t get solved
When you’ve been a cop long enough, you’ve seen many cases, murders, thefts, and various degeneracies. It gnaws at your gut and makes your liver run overtime on the booze you use to forget for a bit. There are some you wish you could have solved and others you just are bewildered by how you didn’t. But there are some you are glad you didn’t solve.
It was a dark stormy morning on April 20th, 1950, when the shrapnel and night terrors got me up around 4, a few nips of bourbon, and I was up putting on my green sport coat and brown slacks and green tie, I said my morning prayers and got the coffee going in the percolator. I sat with a cigarette in hand wondering what corpses were left for us Homicide boys. Would it be a woman whose husband took a fight too far or some dope Addict who OD’ed on the Junk? Or would it be a hold-up that went too far? The Skipper will let us know at the morning roll call.
My wife got up and we discussed the day ahead. The boys were woken up and got ready for school. We had breakfast, morning prayers, and readings. I put on my brown hat and green raincoat and headed to the station.
I arrived at the station and walked up to the squad room. I knew we were getting a corpse or corpses, just whose is the question.
The skipper walked into the squad room 2 minutes after I got in and handed us our cases for the day,
“Mulligan and Marshal, you fellows have a tough case ahead, a Doctor was murdered in west Detroit, but worse he had 18 babies maimed and murdered piled like cordwood, an abortionist, apparently someone finally sent the crud to his judgement for Infanticide.”
Jack and I knew right off we were going to have a nauseating case ahead. We walked off to the police garage, got our 1949 Ford Sedan going, and drove to the scene. On the way, we discussed what we were about to see. I commented,
“Cripes, I had a couple of these when I was on Vice for a bit, they were bad then and it’ll be even worse, Brace yourself, Jack, much of what you saw over in the Pacific won’t prepare you for what you will see.”
Jack replied,
“Well, I will, but I saw some bad stuff over there, liberating the Jap POW camps, still gets to me today, seeing those human skeletons with some skin to cover them.”
“Well such barbarism will be seen, they are the smallest victims that come around.”
At the scene, we found one of the all-time worst scenes ever and it wasn’t even the corpse we were investigating, there were about 18 babies in various stages of development maimed, just smaller babies, many having the faces of permanent screams as this sick bastard ripped them apart I can almost hear them saying, “Mama! DON’T DO THIS! IT HURTS! MAMA!” the horror and pain no shrapnel could give. Looked like it had been a busy night, but someone finally gave the sick bastard his due. Stewart and Brown from the Vice squad were on the scene, even Stewart, someone who dealt with gangsters and hardly had a conscience was shaken by what we saw. They dealt with Abortion Clinics like this before, but not to this extent.
There wasn’t much evidence to go on but from what we could tell he had the racket going for quite a while taking scared women from all walks of life for their money to kill their kids. Someone came in and took his Scalpel to him and then gave him a stomping of his life. Gruesome, but understandable, they probably walked in on him and were stunned, sickened, and enraged by what they found. I sure was, were I on the vice squad I probably would have had to really resist using my revolver on the sick bastard. The fact that we don’t send these pricks to the gas chamber, the electric chair, or the hanging tree, is a blight on us.
We are a nation of laws, and I believe in laws, but there are times you wonder if they are any good if they don’t properly punish this sickness. I half believe whoever did this, did us all a favor by clipping this prick. There are bad guys in all walks of life, there are hitmen, there are thieves, and there are degenerates of all kinds. But those that beat their wives leaving lumps and all that just for their own sadistic pleasure, child molesters, and abortionists are the lowest forms of life on earth, the one can’t even fight like a man and fight other men, but they gotta beat on women, another molests kids, and the final one kills babies just so he or she can make money.
We went to work questioning the Doctor’s secretary and nurse, she was distraught finding out what her boss was doing, every time she seemed just about ready to get herself together she started breaking down. I gave her a shot of my bourbon and a cigarette, and she started to calm down a little bit, and we asked her about her boss’s habits. She told us he often worked late sending her home at around 6, apparently, this was when he really started to add profits by killing babies. She had seen last evening one of the Doctor’s pregnant patients, a Miss Sofia Galiano, she didn’t think too much of it, though odd, and that she was probably having some concern of the pregnancy. She gave us her address. I gave her another drink from my flask and cigarette, and we heeded to investigate Miss Galiano.
I knew the case was eating Jack, Mr. Straight shirt by the book Marshall asked me for some of my bourbon. We stopped off at a liquor store to refill my flask and have a bottle just in case we ran into another perfectly decent person like the Nurse. A cop sees every bit of depravity Man has, and it amazes you how low people go. To kill a baby gets to a guy, especially the results of it. Sometimes you find a woman killed because one of the butchers screwed it up. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Doctor or some degenerate hood in some real dark alley, we get about even, this Doctor sure bumped the numbers up for Doctors. The results of the Infanticide are even worse. As I said, a permanent scream of horror, wondering what is happening, all they did was get conceived, they didn’t ask to be put where they were. I just pray every day and night that maybe we’ll keep the decency to not legally kill children, the illegal ones are already awful.
We got to the address of the suspected “patient” of the doctor, Miss Galiano. She opened the door and was obviously agitated. She looked nervous and was chain-smoking and drinking heavily, Dutch courage to wipe away the guilt, she was a secretary by trade. Her apartment had a Crucifix and Catholic Iconography. She was quite pretty, despite it being obvious she hadn’t slept a wink the whole night.
“Miss, we’re investigating the murder of your doctor, we also found 18 corpses of Infants murdered within the womb, you were seen by the nurse at around 6 last evening going to see your doctor, 12 weeks pregnant, but looking over you now you are not pregnant. Did anyone else know you were going to get your baby murdered?”
“No…I swear I…I..I didn’t do anything, I had uh.. I delivered it prematurely at the Doctor’s.”
“Listen toots, we know what you did, you got scared, your doctor probably told you since you were so scared, not married, that he could take it all away, for a price. You took him up on it, and he killed your baby. You tried to drink it away this morning, but when you do something monstrous it will stick with you. The Lord can forgive you, I don’t know what the state will do, but your doctor is dead murdered by someone who didn’t lose their soul.”
She cried and I gave her my handkerchief. She was obviously a good girl who messed up getting pregnant and was feeling the weight of her panicked deed to rid herself of her mistake. Her tears were heartbreaking, she fessed up after a 5-minute breakdown, she asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. One more girl that sick murderer ruined, another life taken.
“You’re right, I’ve been full of shame, I killed my baby, but I just panicked, I…I just got to thinking of my career as a secretary, and the Doctor told me it would be fine. Since he did the deed I haven’t slept a wink, just drinking and smoking trying to forget.”
“Well miss, we’ll take you in just for questioning, for now, whether we lay charges on you we’ll see. And talk to the DA.”
“Alright, could I talk to a Priest there, it’d sure help.”
“Sure Ma’am we’ll see if we can arrange that.”
Before we took her downtown, we called her priest and asked him
to come downtown to speak with Miss Galiano. We took her downtown, questioning her on the way, she had no further information to give.
It was a tough case, not just the subject matter, but finding the murderer was too. Didn’t really want to find him, after all, he did us a favor with one more monster off the street. Not even the state is kind enough to put to death monsters like that. But it’s our job, to seek to find the sons of Cain that take lives in the city of Detroit. But is one who eliminates a murderer, a murderer? I’m just a cop, but it’s something the legal eagles should get to.
We were called in to investigate a couple of Dead Body reports, they were routine deaths, none suspicious, the price we pay for the great sin of Adam. But it keeps my kids and wife fed, so I cannot really complain too much. I remember the depression of squeezing out enough to keep food on the table and pay the bills.
For the next five weeks we looked for a lead, something that could break the case, we weren’t too determined, you don’t mourn crud like that. But we did our jobs and kept investigating. The doctor was quite the crud, he had been killing babies for a while, and we caught up on his evil deeds. We checked through all of the women who had babies with him or were said to have been pregnant particularly unmarried ones, it didn’t go anywhere, all we found was that he caused a pile of grief and deaths from his “clean” Abortions. Lots of leg work, lots of driving, it led to lots of nowhere. The only thing we figured out was that he was an adulterous scum, we checked with the husbands of the women he had had affairs with. The more we looked the more we found him as loveable as Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin.
We got many false leads, it wore us thin, all this for a bastard that ground-up babies for a sideline. I’m sure there are commie scum that would say this jerk was doing a wonderful service, but even if you are going to debate whether or not the children within the womb are human, wouldn’t you rather be prudent? The worst that happens is that we have a few more children alive. I took another swig of bourbon, going through a lot of it.
We met with the Skipper, and he asked us about our progress, but we had a bunch of dead ends. He told us we may as well close the case, it wasn’t worth the time for a murdering sociopath like that Doctor. The skipper said,
“My guess is that some mobster did the world a favor and got rid of that prick. This ‘victim’ murdered babies, sowed more stray seed than a blind farmer, and was making a mockery of the Hippocratic oath that every Doctor takes. We’ll close it up as an unsolved no point wasting more time on this scumbag.”
Well, that’s the one case I’m sort of glad we didn’t solve. The infanticidal maniac, not worthy to call himself a doctor, ruined many women’s lives and souls. Gave all the cops involved nightmares for weeks upon weeks, giving images that would last a lifetime, maybe we’ll do our job and increase punishments on Abortionists, but my guess is that we’ll become more demonic because most people are scum.
