By Chris Bartholomew
A person claiming to be the killer of the pregnant soldier found dead in a motel has written an anonymous letter calling the murder a “master piece” and threatening to kill again.
'To whom it may concern. The following is to inform that I am responsible for the dead body that was found on Saturday, June 21 @ 1130 in room 143 at Fairfield INN by Marriott off SKibo RD. It was a master piece. I confess that I have killed many times before in several states, but now I will start using my role-model's signature. There will be many more to come. Fayetteville law enforcement are very incompetent. I basically sat there and watch while investigaters were on site.'
(The spelling mistakes are the letter writer's)
The signature is a circle with a cross, as the Zodiac of California used in his letters, which resembles the cross hairs of a rifle scope. (It's possible that this letter-writer is left handed, as he drew the symbol opposite of the original Zodiac.) The date on the letter at the top appears like this: @))* which is what the date would be if the caps lock was on.
A symbol used in the letter is identical to one found written in lipstick on a mirror in the Fairfield Inn room where Spc. Megan Lynn Touma's body was discovered June 21.
The letter is dated June 17, four days before Touma's decomposed body was found in the bathtub of Room 143. The letter was postmarked June 24, the day before it arrived at the paper, and carried a local postmark. The envelope was smeared and blackened with an unknown substance.
Items were taken from the motel room and Touma's rental vehicle by investigators. Among the items taken were two sections of drywall containing a “red substance suspected to be blood” and a mirror. This suggests 'blood spatter' though the cause of death is not known pending completion of an autopsy.
When police saw the hotel room, the bed had been slightly pushed away from the wall, and a nightstand and a lamp on top of it were askew.
Touma arrived in Fayetteville on June 12 after reassignment from the U.S. Army Dental Clinic in Bamberg, Germany. She checked in on her day of arrival but opted to stay at the motel near Cross Creek Mall. She failed to show up for formation with the 19th Replacement Company on June 16. She was not reported AWOL. She was scheduled to check out of the motel June 21 at 11:25. When an assistant manager checked the room, a “Do Not Disturb” sign was hanging from the door. It had been there since June 17, which is why the room had not been checked.
In the days before the computer keyboard, we had typewriters and it wasn't hard to locate which typewriter typed a document because there were always little things those machines did differently that stuck out. In the actual letter, you see that the m looks like a bolded n, so the authorities are probably looking at the letter as good evidence, if there are still any typewriter experts around these days.
The envelope, which has not 'appeared' in public yet is said to have been smeared with a black substance, and a guess would be that it's a possibility that he was having trouble with the typewriter and tried to fix it, possibly the trouble was with the shift key, as there are capitalized words that wouldn't normally be capitalized unless it was sticking. Typewriters had ribbons that left you black if you tried to fix them, so this is a possibility.
The police do have a suspect, but since she was pregnant we can assume that the father of the baby would be an automatic suspect in the case.
Another similarity between this case and that of the Zodiac in California is the fact that she was found at the Fairfield Inn (the letter writer wrote INN) is the fact of the 'Fairfield' letter of the California Zodiac.
If we really wanted to stretch the Zodiac 'copy-cat' theory, we could go to the satellite image of the place where the body was found and we would see a Zodiac symbol in the mall... but that might be taking things a tad too far.
Editor's note: this was written in the summer of 2008, within weeks of the killing and while the case was open, and it is reproduced as written. There was no copycat and there was no serial killer. Edgar Patino, an Army sergeant who had served with Megan Touma in Bamberg and was the father of her unborn child, was charged with her murder on July 30, 2008, and pleaded guilty to second degree murder on November 2, 2010, receiving sixteen to twenty years. The typewriter reasoning in this article is the part that held up. Investigators traced the letter to the machine it was typed on and traced the machine to a pawnshop where Patino had bought it days after the killing; he had sent the letter, and the Zodiac symbol with it, to point the investigation away from himself. The author's other guess held up too: the father of the child was the suspect. This archive has no roster entry for the case, because one murder is not a series, and it is kept here as a record of how quickly a single killing acquires a serial killer once a symbol is drawn on a mirror.