The Pianist’s Intermezzo: Serial Killer Bob Landon
Item description: An internet article written after all the dust has settled. Very informative, but not necessarily telling the truth.
Cited from: Westland Criminal Secrets
Published: 2019-07-18
Had he not been unluckily born at the wrong time, Bob Landon certainly could have become the serial killer who terrorized Westland City. He was sued in April 2016 for violently harming his ex-wife. During the six months he was on bail, he tortured and killed four women who resembled his own wife in appearance and clothing, until the Westland Pianist himself brought his wild and short murderous career to a close.
Today, we can easily imagine the honor that Bob Landon should have had as a serial killer: the numerous newspaper articles, the heated, buzzing discussions on the internet, the deepening shadows on the foreheads of the WLPD officers and the terrified eyes of the hurried travellers at night.
We should have given him gaudy names, like "The Westland Pianist" and "The Sunday Gardener" – two serial killers who are no longer in our view, but I believe that no one will ever forget the atrocious massacres they caused.
But even the WLPD didn't notice Bob Landon when he first started hunting: in his first two cases, Landon took everything of value from the victims – after paying 10 percent of bail to his surety, he was really short of money – so the two female bodies, which bore multiple stab wounds, were later classified by the WLPD as the product of murder-robberies.
In 2016, between April and June, two of Westland's most famous serial killers each committed a crime, including one of the Sunday Gardener's most famous cases: the "Bride's Boat" case. The serial killer, who had been committing crimes in Westland for ten years, causing the deaths of at least 40 people, decorated his victim in this case in an eye-catching and extravagant way, including a flower boat which went downstream.
As one could well imagine, the case sent huge shockwaves and kept the WLPD homicide unit pressured; these old case had not been solved yet, but then the horrifying and shocking[1] case of both of the Norman Brothers being murdered appeared. The WLPD discovered that the Westland Pianist and Sunday Gardener were responding in a strange way to each other's murders – those were the months when the media went on a frenzy. Bob Landon's first two murders' priority level were decreased mutliple times, dragging on until October and remaining unsolved.
[1]骇人听闻, shocking and horrifying
It wasn't until October 8, 2016, on a gloomy Saturday, that a woman named Sarah Adelman was found dead in a narrow alleyway, stabbed forty-one times in the chest. When she was found with a switchblade – the murder weapon that killed her – lodged in her chest, a clear fingerprint was extracted from the handle, belonging to Albarino Bacchus (1982-2017), chief forensic pathologist of the Westland Forensic Bureau.
Our dear readers are popularly familiar with Dr. Bacchus' story one way or the other. My previous article "Saboteurs and Sacrifices: The Pianist's Ganymede" has already devoted many words to this talented forensic pathologist but prematurely died.
He was a man of good moral character, very outstanding in his line of work, which allowed him to become the chief forensic pathologist at a young age. This respectable pathologist had participated in numerous investigations of important criminal cases of the WLPD, including, of course, the cases of the Westland Pianist.
Unfortunately, neither his talents, his professional qualities nor his numerous published academic articles are mentioned nowadays. When people think of him, they often only associate him with two names – the Pianist and Herstal Armalight.
Since Herstal Armalight's escape from the New Tucker Federal Prison in December 2017 and the subsequent Westland Pianist's horrific and shocking mass murders (commonly referred to as the "Christmas Eve Massacre" in common media), there had been rising[2] rumors that Herstal was the Pianist himself. The WLPD stated publicly at a press conference that there had never been direct evidence linking Herstal Armalight to the Westland Pianist.
[2]甚嚣尘上, idiom, lit. noisy, clamorous, dust and sand flying away, meaning rumors rising up everywhere.
The police did sound very certain, but given that the man at the core of the Christmas Eve Massacre was none other than Kaba Stryder, and that Armalight was previously sent to prison for the attempted murder of Stryder, it is difficult not to associate the two as the same person.
Without going into all the conspiracy theories about this mob lawyer, it is a relief to know that at present, he has now fled the American continent and will probably never set foot on Westland soil for the rest of his life. Let's return our attention to Bob Landon: this poor, ignorant serial killer who probably had never imagined that he would become, in a strange method, a plaything in the palms of the Westland Pianist.
Let us boldly hazard a guess: if Herstal Armalight was indeed the Westland Pianist, then at least a part of the mysterious veil surrounding the serial murders perpetrated by Bob Landon could be lifted. With this assumption, let us go back to the moment where the series of events following the murder of Sarah Adelman took place; we will see that these incidents are marked by an uncanny coincidence:
In the early morning on 8th October, Sarah Adelman's body was found. On her bloodied body, in addition to the knife idenified as the murder weapon, a sprig of mint had been placed, a characteristic never seen in Landon's series of murders.
The WLPD quickly ascertained that this poor lady had been involved in an argument with Dr. Bacchus the night before. Through the interrogation transcript partially made public by the WLPD, it was possible to find out that Mr. Armalight and a professor of criminal psychology at Westland State University, Miss Olga Molozer, were present on the night of their confrontation.
According to the investigation, previously Dr. Bacchus had maintained a short relationship with Sarah Adelman, as the extremely handsome young pathologist was infamous for in his social circles; he didn't seem concerned about the relationship. However, some people were convinced that he held a grudge after being publicly humiliated by Sarah, so he committed a horrific atrocity in the back alley of the bar that very night.
Due to the fingerprints as evidence, an arrest warrant was quickly issued for Dr. Bacchus, who was arrested on the 8th. Surprisingly, he chose Mr. Armalight as his lawyer. You have to take in mind that Armalight's law firm, A&H, was notorious among the police for its focus on providing services for defending gangsters and felons, something Dr. Bacchus must have heard about.
To quote what a WLPD insider who wishes to remain anonymous said, "Mr. Armalight doesn't seem to be bothered by Al's (a nickname for Albarino) predicament. Bart (referring to WLPD detective Bart Hardy) arranged a meeting for them on the first day of the interrogation. After that, Mr. Armalight never met with Al again – until Al was released. I'll say, it doesn't seem like this lawyer is competent, does it?"
If that was the case, then things were undoubtedly very mysterious: Mr. Bacchus had already attended the preliminary hearing before the charges were dropped, where he naturally pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Mr. Armalight, "lazily (in the words of the Westland Evening News reporter who was at the hearing)" fought for Dr. Bacchus' to be released on bail, which was then overruled by the judge.
This kind of performance was not exactly the style of Attorney Armalight, given that his most notable accomplishment was the acquittal of a suspect charged with four counts of first-degree murder and eleven counts of second-degree murder, a case where the evidence was even stronger than in Mr. Bacchus's.
At the rate things were going, it seemed inevitable that Dr. Bacchus would be sentenced to prison for second-degree murder, but on the 9th the case had a turnaround: Bob Landon abandoned another female body in front of the WLPD.
This time the body, still dressed in red, was a black-haired woman of similar age to Sarah Adelman; the killer was clearly following the same logic in selecting his victims. When the body was abandoned in front of the police station, Dr. Bacchus was in prison at the time.
Since the new victim's features were so similar to Sarah Adelman's, even with Dr. Bacchus' fingerprints on the murder weapon, the police had to reconsider about the possibility of serial killing. The Westland Police Department had to screen once more for all women in red who had died of unnatural causes during that period: two other cases which had been ruled as robbery-homicide and had been gathering dust for months finally came back into the public eye.
As the list of victims grew longer, the WLPD finally set its sights on Bob Landon.
Landon, who was thirty-eight at the time of the incident, had stabbed his ex-wife with a dagger in his previous violent wife assault case, leaving his ex-wife paralyzed[3]. When he was arrested, his ex-wife filed a restraining order against him, which prevented him from being near his ex-wife and their children.
[3]二级伤残 Level 2 of Disability (in Chinese Law it is according to "人体损伤程度鉴定标准", couldn't find anything in US law) where level 1 is most severe and level 10 is the least severe.
At the preliminary hearing, Landon refused to plead guilty and was released on bail under a bail bondsman. The police found that, at the time of the murder, Landon's activities were restricted to Westland City and his home address was only three blocks away from the bar where Sarah Adelman was killed.
Landon's violent assault case was supposed to go on trial in late October 2016.
– "Supposed to", because when officers from Westland Police Department, fully armed, stormed into the flat where he lived, they found no signs of him.
Officers who attended the crime scene investigation recalled that his room was dirty, gloomy and reeked of rotten food. Members of the crime scene investigation team found some blood which had dried a long time ago in the van he had parked outside the flat, whose DNA matched the body that had been dumped in front of the police station, basically confirming that Bob Landon was the one who committed the second crime.
Yet there was not a single trace of Bob Landon himself.
Was Sarah Adelman killed by him? Were the other two women in red who were thought to have died in the robbery-homicide before also killed by him? Why were Albarino Bacchus's fingerprints on that knife and what did that sprig of mint mean? These were the questions the police officers wanted to ask.
But the flat was empty, with the desk having gathered dust, like the sound of a pitch-dark mouth jeering at them.
Evidently, Bob Landon had already started to flee after provocatively putting that body in front of the police station; no one would want to stay in place and get arrested without resistance[4] after committing such an atrocious incident. The unasked questions of the Westland Police investigators were never answered, and they never found Landon again.
[4]束手就擒, idiom, allow oneself to be seized without putting up a fight
– At least, Landon was never found alive again.
In the meantime, Albarino Bacchus was in a very awkward predicament: at his preliminary hearing, the judge ruled that he was denied bail, so he was temporarily detained at the New Tucker Federal Prison until his case could be heard – the same one which would imprison Herstal Armalight in the future. Bob Landon was a ray of light to get him off the hook, but Landon has clearly escaped without a trace.
Had the WLPD failed to apprehend Landon, Dr. Bacchus' trial would undoubtedly have gone ahead as usual. With the ambiguous attitude of Attorney Armalight it is difficult to imagine whether he would have been found guilty or not. The future seemed to be bleak for Dr. Bacchus then, with the giant hand of fate clearly still playing tricks on him.
Or, in other words, it was the Westland Pianist who still did not let him off the hook.
On the eighth day after the judge issued the warrant for Bob Landon's search and seizure, at about 9 p.m. on Monday, 17 October, 2016, Officer Bart Hardy of the WLPD received a letter from the Westland Pianist.
The exact contents of that letter were never released to the public by the police, but undoubtedly as the Pianist's style always was, he pointed a path for the police – a path full of irony on chasing criminals.
When the WLPD officers arrived at the address as stated in the letter, they were greeted by a horrifying scene drenched with blood, which, like the Pianist's usual style, revealed a peculiar glee in the process of slaughtering.
The police found Bob Landon's body in a filthy alleyway downtown, hanging from the eaves by piano strings, with more than fifty stab wounds on his chest by a sharp blade, almost forming a bloody canvas on his chest. Almost all his blood had been run dry, with a gigantic pool of blood beneath his feet.
Bob Landon's chest was cut open, his ribs broken off and neatly forced outwards, sinisterly protruding out. Within his chest, the heart was nowhere to be found; in its place was a rather delicately and exquisitely woven sphere bouquet of mint, the mint leaves even interspersed with pale purple mint blossoms. This cluster of mint was probably difficult to obtain; October was, after all, well past the season for mint.
Given that Landon had also left a sprig of mint on Sarah Adelman's chest before he killed her, most scholars agree that the Pianist's move was nothing more than satire on Landon – like how he did the same for every criminal he killed. In his massacre, he was clearly looking down on them from high above, raising his own scales and sword.
This was Bob Landon and his end. After being determined as a serial killer by the WLPD, he was on the run everyday. Even that didn't last long, as he died in a highly dramatic fashion by the Westland Pianist's hands within days.
Since then, it seemed that with Bob Landon dead and the truth buried, it would be difficult for Dr. Bacchus to escape his end in prison. Yet, almost at the same time as the WLPD discovered Landon's body, a very dramatic event happened simultaneously too.
On 17th October the same day, while re-examining Landon's flat, CSI's on-site investigators found under the floorboards beneath his bed trophies of Landon's homicides: a diary which described his killings, filled with enjoyment on them, in detail; four locks of female hair bundled up neatly, which, through DNA testing, was found to correspond to four of Landon's victims exactly.
With strong and overwhelming evidence[5], all charges faced by Dr. Bacchus were quickly dropped. Almost as soon as the officers of WLPD arrived at the scene of the murder Westland Pianist created, Dr. Bacchus' custody had officially ended.
[5]铁证如山, idiom, lit. evidence so solid it is as immovable as a mountain, meaning strong evidence.
The moment one suspect was released from custody, another was officially pronounced dead; this was a cleverly executed plot full of irony by the Westland Pianist.
Yet even when Dr. Bacchus was cleared of the charges, the police were still very perplexed as to why the Westland Pianist had chosen Bob Landon as his target, or how exactly did Albarino Bacchus's fingerprints appear on the blade. However, in the end the matter was left unresolved, becoming one of the difficult mysteries in numerous unsolved cases.
But those of us who examine this old case now may think otherwise, namely: if Herstal Armalight were the Westland Pianist, Bob Landon was just an expendable victim in his very long and twisted game.
Whether the victim was Landon or any other person, it was meaningless for the Pianist. He was nothing more than a plaything and something to waste his time on, the silly protagonist of a burlesque[6] played out during the interval between scenes, a puppet dancing gracefully controlled by strings. Because he hadn't wanted to punish Landon for his crimes, his target from the beginning was Dr. Bacchus.
[6]A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. (from wikipedia)
As most might know, Dr. Bacchus was probably the Westland Pianist's most special victim, being the most difficult to categorize – and also the only one to survive under the Westland Pianist's pulsating piano strings, although he died less than a year later in another murder.
Although the WLPD has never admitted it, we are almost certain that the victim of that astonishing case in late 2016 was Dr. Bacchus. The Westland Pianist, judged by psychopathologists to be a sadist, had only sexually assaulted one of his victims in his numerous criminal cases, which was this special case.
The public statement by the police on that case was: he attacked one of the people involved in uncovering the Pianist's cases, tortured and assaulted this person, yet didn't kill him in the end.
The contents of Olga Molozer's criminal profiling for that case is still something criminal psychology majors would repeatedly pour over. Let us directly quote what she informed the reporters after that case during a press conference:
"Like the Sunday Gardener, the Westland Pianist also treats his victims as a well-thought out piece presented to the public. He ridiculed the police in the process of writing a letter to the police, humiliating them through violent methods, and also a kind of humiliation towards the victim at the same time.
"I know what question you want to ask. My answer is – 'No, he isn't the kind of sexual pervert who likes to inflict his own sexual desire onto his victims'. He does derive pleasure from torturing his victims, but assualting them is not a straightforward way to get that pleasure for him. What he had done in this case was not for the pursuit for pleasure, but it was for some sort of metaphorical expression: he is scornful of us, enraged that we have destroyed the work he had presented. So, he imposes the same 'sin' on us, just like how he punished criminals.
"Just like how we dismantle his work, he tortures the victim in this case, violating the victim in a way that he originally would not have cared for, proudly displaying the victim in front of us, in order to make a mockery of us – this was the only reason he didn't kill his victim. For only then will this work never decay, never be turned to dust, unable to be destroyed by us; only then, on a day when the victim is alive, we will all think of this shameful day."
If, as we suspect, Armalight was the Westland Pianist, then he had already had his eye on Albarino Bacchus as early as the end of 2016 – with very malicious intent.
Then, it would also explain the many suspicious aspects of the case of Bob Landon: perhaps Dr. Bacchus's fingerprints appeared on the murder weapon was because of the Pianist's failed framing attempt; perhaps the sprig of mint on Sarah Adelman's chest was placed by the Pianist, as otherwise it would be impossible to explain why this criminal signature did not appear on Landon's other victims.
One can imagine why the Pianist's sharp anger was directed towards Albarino Bacchus: the very skilled forensic pathologist was responsible for the autopsies for numerous significant cases in Westland City, which also includes the Westland Pianist's and the Sunday Gardener's cases.
It was under Dr. Bacchus' hands where these crazy works of art were dismantled, restored, returning from the dreamlike fantasies of psychopaths to the cold, unforgiving reality of the human world. The serial killer's creations were certainly not respected; naturally, this forensic pathologist might have evoked the anger of the Westland Pianist, making him put this horrifying fury into practice.
In that case, the arrest of Dr. Bacchus in Landon's case was only just the most initial test; in that horrifying case not long later, the Pianist had clearly completely destroyed this forensic pathologist. Yet – supposing that Armalight really was the Westland Pianist – his fury still had not been quenched by this.
After Armalight's arrest for attempted murder, the WLPD searched his flat, where they found a huge amount of fresh blood – after bleeding that much blood, almost anyone would not be still alive. The blood spatter at the scene told people that there was a person who was murdered in this excessively tidy flat without personality, throat cleanly slit.
– The blood belonged to one person: Dr. Albarino Bacchus.
Dr. Bacchus' body has still not yet been found. At first, the police had attempted to find him, or make Armalight talk about where the body was; both methods ended in crushing defeat. Day after day passed, until Dr. Bacchus' closest comrade-in-arms have all given up the struggle. In February of this year, the WLPD had already announced the death of this forensic pathologist.
Many have speculated on the Pianist's actions from a more romantic perspective. Some who have paid attention to this series of cases – including myself – believe that the Pianist targeted Dr. Bacchus this way because he was equally responsible for his destruction of the Sunday Gardener's work. And, as we all know, the Sunday Gardener was actually the one who obsessively treated his murder cases as artistic creations.
From a completely macroscopic point of view – that is, from our transcendental point of view, by recalling the time period when these events took place – turning back time to between the later half of 2016 to the end of 2017, where all kinds of atrocious murder cases took place:
When we recall the abnormal anger of the Westland Pianist held towards Dr. Bacchus; recall the bouquet of mint in Landon's heart, in the Sunday Gardener's decoration style; recall the corpses which were used to deliver unknown mutters between the Sunday Gardener and the Westland Pianist; recall that prison escape; recall that atrocious massacre at the Our Lady the Rosary Church...
In that case, the end of Bob Landon and that bouquet on his chest would seem to have a rational explanation. Even the predicament of an innocent pathologist might be the deranged act of a person who had madly fallen head over heels in love –
It could also be a love letter to the Sunday Gardener.
Author's Notes
1. (Opera) Intermezzo: A type of singing and dancing performance or short burlesque, independent of the contents of opera, added during intervals for Italian Opera performances during the 17th to 18th century.
2. Bail Bond Business:
Bob Landon was prosecuted for very serious and violent assault, a crime which required an exorbitant amount of bail which Landon could not afford. In such cases, he can turn to a bail bondsman.
Landon will pay ten percent of the bail to the bail bondsman, who will then sign a certificate of guarantee which guarantees that the defendant will be able to attend the trial or appear in court on time and at the venue. Then, the suspect can be released on bail without the surety having to pay for the bail. If Landon had run away before the hearing (which he did), the surety would have to pay for the full amount of the bail.
Of course, if Landon does not escape, the bail bondsman would earn ten percent of the bail money that Landon had given to the surety; this is how the industry earns a profit.
However, since many suspects flee before trial, being a commercial surety is risky. They usually have to think of every method to ensure that the suspect will attend the trial as normal, or else they must bear the loss of the suspect's escape.
3. Ganymede: A beautiful young man in Greek mythology, the Prince of Troy. Attracted by his beauty, Zeus turned into an eagle and kidnapped him to Mount Olympus, where he became cupbearer of the gods.
"The harmonious daily life mini theater for psycho serial killers"
Al: Is this article talking about what I think it's talking about? You would kill me just to get into the Sunday Gardener's good graces?
Herstal: I'm only willing to do the "killing you" part in this whole sentence.