The Case of the Fake Sherlock

Richard Walter was hailed as a genius criminal profiler at murder trials, at forensic conferences, and on true-crime TV. In reality, he was a fraud. How did he get away with it for so long?

- David Gauvey Herbert

COQUILLE, ON the Oregon coast, is a two-stoplight town where mist rolls off the Pacific and many of the 4,000 residents work in lumber and fishing. On the night of June 28, 2000, a 15-year-old named Leah Freeman left a friend’s house and set off on her own. She was seen walking past McKay’s Market, the credit union, and the high school, but she never made it home. At a gas station, a county worker found one of Leah’s sneakers.

The local paper published Leah’s school photo: big smile, mouthful of braces. Police and a donor put together a $10,000 reward for information leading to her safe return. K-9 units swept the school grounds, and police set up roadblocks and interviewed motorists. On its sign, the Myrtle Lane Motel posted a description of Leah. A month later, the message was replaced with Job 1:22: “The Lord gives. The Lord takes.” A search party had found Leah’s body at the bottom of an embankment, severely decomposed. “We prayed for her to return,” the motel manager told a reporter. “And now we can pray for whoever did this to be caught.”

But the killer was not caught. The police had initially treated Leah as a runaway before mounting a search, and when the FBI and state police finally arrived, investigators were too far behind. They never recovered. As months turned into years, Coquille police dwelled on one suspect whose story never quite made sense to them: Nick McGuffin, Leah’s 18-year-old boyfriend. Friends had seen them argue. Police said he switched cars the night she vanished and flunked a polygraph. The hunch was there, but the physical evidence wasn’t.