Prologue
Eighteen-year-old Carolyn Grimes was seated on the number 9 express bus from Miami, Florida, to New Orleans Louisiana. She lovingly gazed out the window as the bus roared along the Mississippi river and the waves glistened in the moonlight. A light drizzle of rain started to come down, and as the raindrops hit the river, they seemed to bounce back up like little fireflies. She smiled as she thought about the many moonlight swims she’d done with her childhood friends and about all the familiar sights of her hometown, New Orleans. Then she felt a little uneasy as she thought about what her parents would say, especially her father, about her surprise visit. She recalled one time when she was fifteen and she and her younger brother was walking home from school. Warren had run off and almost gotten hit by an oncoming car. Her father found out about it and grounded her for a month but later changed his mind and told her to just look after her little brother.
Would her home coming be a happy greeting or a disappointing one?
The question plagued her young mind.
After all, it had only been a few months since she had left home, and she wasn’t planning on returning to college anymore. She could hear her father’s stern voice yelling, “You never finish anything you start.” He would give her his famous holier-than-thou look. “You’re just like your mother,” he would always say.
And she would always reply, “Yes, and I’m proud of it.”
A wide smile came over her face as she thought about that. But her father wasn’t really as hard as he pretended.
He loved her to death. It was just that being a man, it was hard for him to show emotions sometimes, but to tell the truth, he’d wanted his firstborn to be a son. That sounds pretty old-fashioned, but Robert Grimes was born doing the Depression years, and kids had to grow up more quickly then, and that usually meant that the oldest, which usually was the boy, had to take over sometimes when times got hard. And during his childhood, that’s exactly what he’d had to do.
Soon the bus pulled up to the station. It was 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning the fourteenth day of February 1961. The driver helped Carolyn with her two suitcases. She’d left her other things at the dorm. She was planning on retrieving them later. She thanked the driver for helping her. He tip his hat and told her it was his pleasure, then got back on the bus. Luckily, the rain had stopped.
The Heart Taker Murder's
She started her walk from the station, which was a few blocks from her home. Her hair began to flow from a calm breeze. As she walked, she was suddenly overwhelmed with fear. She had this feeling that someone was following her. She started to walk faster and faster. Out of terror, she dropped her suitcases and started to run as fast as she could, but she is caught by her pursuer.
“Carolyn!” the mystery man shouted out to her. “What’s the matter?”
She soon realized that the stranger was an old friend—or
that’s what she thought!
Later that morning, around 6:00 a.m., she was found in the Audubon Park by the police. She was sitting on a bench with her blouse torn off her small little body, exposing her two small breasts. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear, her head almost amputated from her body. It was the work of a very sharp weapon, maybe a dagger or straight-edge razor. Most of her blood had been drained from her body. Also, her heart had been cut out. It was a horrible crime. Who could have done such a thing?
Inspector Cooper was in charge of the investigation. He had his men working 24/7. He had been on the force for a number of years, so he had become accustomed to gruesome types of murder, but this one was close to home. He had become friends with her father and looked upon Carolyn as the daughter he never had.
In the world of homicide, the police tries to find clues within the first forty-eight hours. Usually if they are lucky,
The Heart Taker Murders
they can find the killer in that time frame. In this case, the killer or killers were never found. Robert Grimes spent years trying to find the killer or killers of his beloved daughter. He spent thousands of dollars on private investigators, but to no avail. He could never bring himself to tell her younger brother, Warren, how she really died. He always told him that she had drowned in the river. This turned out to be very confusing for the young boy growing up.
He got in many school fights with the other kids, who always teased him that his sister was killed by a monster who stole her heart. He didn’t tell Warren the true story until he was seventeen.
Every morning after the murder, Robert Grimes would look into his daughter’s bedroom in the hopes of seeing her lying there asleep. One day, as he opened the door, there she was fast asleep. But she wasn’t grown up! She was little again, seven years old. She opened her eyes and looked straight at her father and said, “Why did you let him hurt me, Daddy?”
Then he woke up from his nightmare. He hurried into her room, just to check and see, and, of course, it was empty. He prayed for peace of mind, but he would never have it until the killer or killers were found.
