Chapter 17: The Pianist’s Interlude: Serial Killer Bob Landon
Source: Westland Criminal Secrets Network
Publish Date: 2019-07-18
If not for being born at the wrong time, Bob Landon could certainly have become a serial killer who struck fear into the hearts of Westland’s citizens. In April 2016, he was prosecuted for violently assaulting his ex-wife. During the six months he was out on bail pending trial, he tortured and killed four women who resembled his wife in appearance and clothing, until the Westland Pianist personally put an end to his mad and short-lived murder spree.
These days, we can easily imagine the sort of serial-killer glory that Bob Landon should have enjoyed: endless newspaper coverage, heated online discussions, the ever-deepening shadows on the brows of WLPD officers, and the fearful eyes of hurried passersby in the night.
We should have given him a flashy name, just like “the Westland Pianist” and “the Sunday Gardener”—though these two serial killers have already left our sight, I believe no one can forget the horrifying massacres they committed.
But when Bob Landon first began his hunt, even the WLPD had not noticed his existence: because in the first two crimes, Landon took every valuable item from the victims—after paying the bondsman a ten percent bail fee, he really was short on money—and these two female corpses, bearing multiple knife wounds, were classified by the WLPD after the incidents as the product of robbery-homicides.
Between April and June of 2016, the two most famous serial killers in Westland each committed a crime, including one of the Sunday Gardener’s most infamous cases: the “Bride Ship” case. This serial killer, who had been committing crimes continuously in Westland for ten years and had caused at least nearly forty deaths, in this case decorated his victim in a particularly extravagant and eye-catching manner, including even a flower boat that drifted downstream.
Predictably, this case caused an enormous sensation and kept the WLPD homicide detectives overwhelmed with work. Before these old cases could be solved, the horrifying case of the Norman brothers being murdered in pairs emerged: the WLPD discovered that the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener were actually responding to each other’s murders in a strange way—those were months of media frenzy, and the priority of Bob Landon’s first two murder cases was lowered again and again, remaining unsolved even by early October.
It was not until October 8, 2016, a gloomy Saturday, that a woman named Sarah Adelman was found dead in a narrow alley, with forty-one stab wounds to her chest. When she was discovered, a switchblade was lodged in her chest—the murder weapon that killed her—and a clear fingerprint was extracted from the handle, belonging to Albanino Bacchus (1982–2017), the chief medical examiner of the Westland Forensic Bureau.
Readers must be more or less familiar with Dr. Bacchus’s story. In my previous article, “The Destroyer and the Sacrifice: The Pianist’s Ganymede,” I already used a great deal of ink to depict this brilliant yet short-lived forensic examiner for everyone.
He was a man of upright character and outstanding professional ability, and for this reason he had become the chief forensic examiner at a young age. This esteemed doctor had participated in the investigation of a great many major criminal cases for the WLPD, including, of course, the case of the Westland Pianist.
Unfortunately, the forensic examiner’s talent and professional caliber, along with the many academic papers he had published, were now seldom brought up. When people thought of him, they tended to associate him with only two names—the Pianist and Halstall Amarette.
Ever since Halstall Amarette escaped from New Tucker Federal Prison in December 2017, and the Westland Pianist immediately afterward committed a horrifying multiple murder case (commonly referred to by the media as the “Christmas Eve Massacre”), rumors that Halstall was the Pianist himself had run rampant. The WLPD publicly stated at a press conference that there had never been any direct evidence linking Halstall Amarette to the Westland Pianist.
The police spoke with absolute certainty, but given that the central figure of the “Christmas Eve Massacre” was none other than Kaba Straid, and that Amarette had previously been imprisoned for the attempted murder of Straid, it was hard not to make the association that the two were in fact the same person.
There is no need to elaborate on the various conspiracy theories surrounding this mob lawyer. As of today, we are certain that he has fled the American continent, and in all likelihood will never set foot on Westland soil for the rest of his life—which is undoubtedly a relief. Let us instead turn our attention back to Bob Landon: this poor, ignorant serial killer likely never imagined that he would, in such a strange manner, become a plaything in the hands of the Westland Pianist.
Let us boldly speculate: if Hestal Amarette is indeed the Westland Pianist, then at least a corner of the mysterious veil shrouding the serial murder case orchestrated by Bob Landon can be lifted. Let us, with this speculation in mind, trace back to the moment when a series of events unfolded after Sarah Adelman’s murder, and we will find that these events carry an indescribable sense of coincidence:
On the morning of October 8th, Sarah Adelman’s body was discovered. Upon her bloodied and mangled corpse, in addition to the knife identified as the murder weapon, a bundle of mint was placed—a characteristic that had never appeared in Landon’s series of murders.
The WLPD quickly ascertained that this poor woman had gotten into an argument with Dr. Bax the previous night. Through the portions of the interrogation records made public by the WLPD, it can be determined that on the night of their conflict, Mr. Amarette and Ms. Olga Moroze, a professor of criminal psychology at Westland State University, were also present at the scene.
According to the investigation, prior to this, Dr. Bax had been maintaining a casual affair with Sarah Adelman, and just as this exceptionally handsome young doctor’s reputation in social circles suggested, he did not seem to care much about the relationship. However, some people firmly believed that after being publicly humiliated by Sarah, he harbored a grudge and committed the horrifying atrocity in the back alley of the bar that very night.
Given the fingerprints as evidence, an arrest warrant for Dr. Bax was quickly issued, and Bax was arrested on the 8th. Unexpectedly, he chose Mr. Amarette as his lawyer. One should know that Amarette’s A&H Law Firm was notorious in police circles for focusing on defending gangsters and serious criminals, and Dr. Bax certainly must have heard of this as well.
And citing an unnamed internal source from the WLPD: “Mr. Amarette didn’t seem to care much about Al’s (a nickname for Albanino) predicament. Bart (referring to WLPD Detective Bart Hardy) arranged a meeting for them, during the first day of interrogation, and after that Mr. Amarette never met with Al again—until Al was released. I mean, a lawyer like that doesn’t seem very competent, right?”
If that was indeed the case, then the matter was undoubtedly very delicate: Mr. Bax had already attended the pretrial hearing before the charges against him were dropped. He naturally pleaded not guilty at the hearing, and his lawyer Mr. Amarette “lazily (as quoted from a Westland Evening News reporter who attended the hearing)” made a bid for Dr. Bax’s bail rights in court, and was then rejected by the judge.
Such a performance was truly unlike Attorney Amarette’s style, given that his most brilliant achievement was securing the acquittal of a suspect charged with four counts of first-degree murder and eleven counts of second-degree murder—a case in which the evidence was even more conclusive than Mr. Bakes’s.
If things continued this way, it seemed inevitable that Dr. Bakes would be convicted of second-degree murder. However, on the 9th, the case took a small turn: Bob Landon abandoned another woman’s corpse at the entrance of the WLPD.
Once again, the body was dressed in red—a black-haired woman of similar age to Sarah Adman. The killer had clearly selected the victim according to the same logic, and at the time the body was dumped at the police station entrance, Dr. Bakes was in prison.
Because the new victim’s characteristics were extremely similar to Sarah Adman’s, even with Dr. Bakes’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, the police had to consider the possibility of a serial killer. The Westland City Police Department was forced to re-screen all women in red who had died unnaturally during this period, and two other cases that had been classified as robbery-homicides and sealed for several months finally returned to public attention.
As the list of victims grew longer and longer, the WLPD finally set its sights on Bob Landon.
At the time of the incident, Landon was thirty-eight years old. In his previous case of domestic violence against his wife, he had stabbed his ex-wife with a dagger, causing her second-degree disability. During his arrest, his ex-wife filed a restraining order against him, preventing him from getting anywhere near her and their child.
During the pre-trial hearing, Landon refused to plead guilty and was released on bail under the guarantee of a professional bondsman. The police discovered that at the time of the incident, Landon’s activities were restricted to within the city of Westland, and his home address was only three streets away from the bar where Sarah Adelman was murdered.
Langdon’s violent assault case was originally scheduled to go to trial at the end of October 2016.
—He should have been, because when the officers of the Westland City Police Department stormed the apartment where he lived fully armed, they found no trace of him.
According to the officers who participated in the crime scene investigation, his room was filthy, gloomy, and filled with the stench of rotting food. Members of the crime scene investigation team found some long-coagulated bloodstains in the van he had parked outside the apartment. The DNA matched the corpse that had been dumped at the police station entrance, making it almost certain that Bob Landon was the one who had committed the second crime.
But Bob Landon himself had already vanished without a trace.
Was Sarah Adelman killed by him? Were the other two women in red, previously suspected of dying in robbery-homicides, also killed by him? Why were Albanino Bacchus’s fingerprints on that knife, and what did that bundle of mint mean? These were all questions the police wanted to ask.
But the apartment was empty and deserted, the tabletop already covered in dust, like a dark gaping mouth letting out a mocking laugh.
Bob Landon had evidently already begun his flight after provocatively dumping that corpse at the police station entrance—no one who had done something so horrifying would want to stay put and wait to be caught. The unanswered questions of the Westland Police Department detectives would remain unanswered; they never found Landon again.
—At least, they never found Landon alive again.
Meanwhile, Albanino Bacchus found himself in an extremely awkward position: at his pre-trial hearing, the judge ruled that he would not be granted bail, so before his case went to trial, he was temporarily detained at New Tucker Federal Prison—the same place where Hestal Amaretto would eventually end up behind bars—Bob Landon was a glimmer of hope for his exoneration, but Landon had clearly already fled far away.
If the WLPD failed to capture Landon, Dr. Bax’s trial would undoubtedly proceed as scheduled, and given Attorney Amarette’s ambiguous attitude, it was hard to imagine whether he would actually be found guilty. At that time, Dr. Bax’s future must have seemed utterly bleak, and the giant hand of fate was clearly still toying with him.
Or in other words, the Westland Pianist still had not let him go.
On the eighth day after the judge issued the arrest warrant for Bob Landon—that is, on the evening of Monday, October 17, 2016, around nine o’clock—WLPD Officer Bart Hardy received a letter from the Westland Pianist.
The police never released the specific contents of that letter to the public, but it was undoubtedly just like the Pianist’s usual style—he pointed out a path for the police, a path of pursuit filled with irony.
When the WLPD officers arrived at the address the Pianist had described in his letter, they were met with a horrifying scene drenched in blood—just as the Pianist’s style had always been: bloody, brutal, and revealing an eerie delight in the midst of slaughter.
Police discovered Bob Landon’s body in a filthy alley in the Lower District. He had been hung from the eaves by piano wire, his chest bearing over fifty knife wounds from a sharp blade, nearly turning his chest into a canvas of mangled flesh and blood. His blood had almost completely drained, pooling into a massive puddle beneath his feet.
Bob Landon’s chest had been cut open, his ribs neatly snapped outward, jutting out in a grotesque manner. Within his chest cavity, his heart was nowhere to be found; in its place was a remarkably intricate spherical arrangement of mint leaves, woven together with even a few pale purple mint flowers tucked among the leaves. This floral arrangement must have been difficult to obtain—after all, October was already past the blooming season for mint flowers.
Given that Landon had also left a bundle of mint on Sarah Adman’s chest before killing her, most scholars believed that the Pianist’s gesture was nothing more than a mockery of Landon—just as he had mocked every criminal he had killed. In his slaughter, he clearly looked down upon them from above, raising his own scales and sword of judgment.
This was the story of Bob Landon and his end. Every day after being identified by the WLPD as a serial killer, he was on the run, and even that did not last long. Within a few days, he died in a highly dramatic fashion at the hands of the Westland Pianist.
From then on, it seemed that with Bob Landon dead and unable to testify, Dr. Bax was inevitably headed to prison. But almost at the same time the WLPD discovered Landon’s corpse, something equally dramatic happened.
On October 17th, when CSI field investigators re-examined Landon’s apartment, they discovered beneath the floorboards under the bed the trophies Landon had kept from his series of murders: a diary that described his killing process in lavish, relishing detail; and four bundles of women’s hair, neatly tied, which DNA testing revealed corresponded exactly to Landon’s four victims.
With irrefutable evidence, all charges against Dr. Bax were quickly dropped. Almost at the very moment WLPD officers were rushing to the murder scene created by the Westland Pianist, Dr. Bax’s detention formally came to an end.
The moment one criminal suspect was released from custody, another criminal suspect was formally declared dead—for the Westland Pianist, this might have been a rather ironic and clever plot design.
However, even after Dr. Bacchus’s charges were cleared, the police remained deeply puzzled as to why the Westland Pianist would choose Bob Landon as a target, or how Albanino Bacchus’s fingerprints had ended up on the blade. But in the end, the matter fizzled out, becoming one of the countless unsolvable mysteries among cold cases.
But now, as we examine this old case, we might arrive at a different thought: if Hestal Amaret was the Westland Pianist, then Bob Landon was merely a sacrifice in his long and twisted game.
Whether the victim was Landon or anyone else meant nothing to the Pianist, because they were merely playthings and diversions—the foolish protagonist of a farce performed between acts, a puppet dancing along to the pull of strings; because he had never intended to punish Landon’s crimes—his target had been Dr. Bacchus from the very beginning.
It is well known that Dr. Bax was very likely the Westland Pianist’s most unusual and most difficult-to-classify victim—and also the only victim to survive beneath the Westland Pianist’s quivering strings, though he died in another homicide less than a year later.
Although the WLPD has never admitted it, we can be almost certain that the victim of that shocking case at the end of 2016 was Dr. Bax. Among the many crimes of the Westland Pianist, whom psychopathologists have judged to be a sadist, there was only one time he actually sexually assaulted his victim—and that was this particular case.
The police’s public statement was: in that case, he attacked a person involved in investigating the Pianist case, tortured and violated this person, but in the end did not kill him.
The profile that Professor Olga Moroz made of that case is still to this day material that students of criminal psychology repeatedly study. Let us quote directly from the report she gave to reporters at the press conference after that case:
“Just like the Sunday Gardener, the Westland Pianist also treats his victims as carefully presented works for the public. In his letters to the police, he mocks them, insulting them through violent means—which is simultaneously an insult to the deceased.
“I know what you want to ask me, and I will answer—’No, he is not the kind of sexual deviant who imposes his sexual desires upon his victims.’ He does derive a certain pleasure from the process of torturing his victims, but violating them is not the direct means by which he obtains pleasure. In this case, what he did was not in pursuit of pleasure, but for a certain metaphorical expression: he despises us, is angered by our destruction of the work he presented, and so—just as he punishes sinners—he imposes the same ‘sin’ upon us.
“Just as we dismantle his work, he tortured the victim in this case, violated the victim in a manner he himself would ordinarily disdain, and proudly displayed the victim before us in order to mock us—this is the sole reason he did not kill the victim. Because only in this way will the work not decay, will it not turn to dust, will it be beyond our ability to destroy; only in this way, on some day while the victim still lives, will all of us recall this day of humiliation.”
If, as we suspect, Amaretto is the Westland Pianist, then he had already set his sights on Albanino Bacchus well before the case at the end of 2016 occurred—with malicious intent.
Then it would also explain the many suspicious aspects of the Bob Landon case: perhaps Dr. Bax’s fingerprints appeared on the murder weapon only because of a failed frame-up by the Pianist; perhaps the sprig of mint placed on Sarah Adelman’s chest was left there by the Pianist, for otherwise there was no explaining why this criminal signature never appeared on any of Landon’s other victims.
We can imagine why the Pianist’s sharp fury was directed at Albanino Bax: this highly skilled forensic pathologist was responsible for the autopsies in many major cases in Westland, including those of the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener.
These mad artistic works were dissected and reconstructed under Dr. Bax’s hands, returning from the psychopath’s fantasies to the cold, ruthless reality of the human world. The creations of a serial killer were of course not respected, and this forensic pathologist had likely, quite justifiably, provoked the wrath of the Westland Pianist—who then put that terrible fury into action.
In that case, Dr. Bax’s arrest in the Landon case was merely the initial experiment. In the terrible case that followed not long after, the Pianist had indeed very nearly destroyed this forensic pathologist completely. And—if Amarette truly was the Westland Pianist—his fury had clearly not been appeased by this.
After Amarette was arrested for attempted murder, the WLPD searched his apartment and discovered a large amount of fresh blood—it was almost impossible for anyone to lose that much blood and still be alive. The splatter patterns at the scene told people that someone had been murdered in that obsessively, lifelessly tidy apartment, their throat cleanly slit.
—All that blood belonged to one person: Dr. Albanino Bax.
Dr. Bax’s remains had never been found. At first, the police tried to find him, or to make Amarette reveal the whereabouts of his body—both attempts ended in utter failure. Day after day, until even Dr. Bax’s closest comrades gave up the fight, and this February, the WLPD officially declared the forensic examiner dead.
Many people speculated about the Pianist’s actions from a more romantic angle. Some who followed this series of cases—including this author—believed that the reason the Pianist targeted Dr. Bax so specifically was also because he had ruined the Sunday Gardener’s work. And as we all know, it was the Sunday Gardener who was the one persistently treating murder as artistic creation.
And from a completely macroscopic perspective—that is, from our detached vantage point as we look back on the timeline of these events—let us trace the years back to the period between the second half of 2016 and the end of 2017, when a series of horrifying murders took place:
When we recall the Westland Pianist’s abnormal rage toward Dr. Bax, recall the sprig of mint arranged in the Sunday Gardener’s decorative style upon Langdon’s heart, recall those corpses used to convey unknowable whispers between the Sunday Gardener and the Westland Pianist, recall that prison break, recall the horrifying massacre in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary that followed…
That way, Bob Langdon’s end and the bouquet upon his chest seemed to have a reasonable explanation, and even an innocent forensic pathologist’s predicament might also be the disordered act of someone caught in a frenzied, passionate love—
This could also be a love letter written to the Sunday Gardener.
[1] Intermezzo: A type of independent performance, such as a song-and-dance act or comic skit, inserted between the acts of Italian operas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
[2] Regarding commercial bail:
Bob Landon was prosecuted for extremely serious violent assault. The bail amount required for this type of crime is extremely high, and it is more than Landon can afford. In this situation, he can turn to a professional bondsman.
Landon would pay ten percent of the bail to a commercial bondsman. After the commercial bondsman signs a guarantee stating that the defendant will appear at the designated time and place for interrogation or in court to stand trial, the bondsman can take the defendant out on bail without paying the bail amount. If Landon flees before the trial (and he did indeed flee), the bondsman pays the full bail amount.
Of course, if Landon does not flee, the commercial bondsman earns the ten percent of the bail that Landon paid to the bondsman. This is how this industry makes its profit.
However, since many suspects will flee before the trial, working as a commercial bail bondsman carries risk. They usually have to exhaust every possible method to ensure the criminal suspect appears in court on schedule; otherwise, they must bear the financial loss of the suspect’s flight.
[3] Ganymede: A beautiful youth in Greek mythology, a prince of Troy. Zeus was captivated by his beauty, transformed into an eagle, and abducted Ganymede to Mount Olympus, where he became the cupbearer of the gods.