Wild Bill

BOCAS DEL TDRO IS A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE.

AMERICAN EXPATS IN PANAMA KNEW BILL CORTEZ WAS WEIRD, BUT THEY DIDN'T REALIZE HOW WEIRD. NOBODY WAS SHADIER THAN WILD BILL. PLAYBOY INVESTIGATES A MURDER IN PARADISE

KEITH WERLE HADN'T SEEN his wife, Cher Hughes, for three months. That was in July 2010, when a special detail of the Panamanian National Police took her remains out of a shallow grave on a hillside, beneath a grove of giant ceiba trees. Cher had once been a knockout, a slim five-foot-10 blonde with full lips and Farrah-like curls. But on this July day Werle barely recognized her. The jungle and the bullet that had exploded the back of her head had taken their effect. Werle was able to identify the tatter of clothes still clinging to what was once her lithe torso. It was small comfort that the four bodies buried around her had already been scoured to skeletons by insects in the moist, loamy soil. Werle cried then, silent tears for a woman from whom he

had separated but for whom he still cared deeply.

As Werle paces the linoleum floor of the Panama City morgue some 200 miles from that jungle grave, as he waits to reclaim Hughes's desiccated body and autopsied brain, the dingy yellow walls close in. And tears are the last thing on his mind. The female government functionary has already informed him that his paper­work is not in order, and as Werle stares at his local attorney, the morgue attendant adds, albeit with a compassionate smile, that tomorrow might be a better time to collect his wife.

The morgue is in one of the stolid, American-built administrative build­ings on the south side of the old Canal Zone. Werle arrived here with his U.S. passport and a Panamanian certificate of marriage to Cheryl Lynn Hughes dated October 25, 2005. Now, after a conver­sation in Spanish between his lawyer and the clerk, Werle is informed he will also need to produce Hughes's original death certificate—which is still in police custody in the provincial capital of Bocas del Toro, on Panama's Caribbean coast— as well as the official, government-issued DNA report, which for some reason has been filed in an investigator's office in the city of David, across the isthmus on the Pacific coast.

This is too much for Werle, and he stomps out into a humid October day to light up a smoke. He began the habit again after Cher's disappear­ance in March, often burning through as many as four packs a day. As he pats the empty pocket of his white linen guayabera, I hand him a Marlboro. The rain has stopped, and steam rises from the street. A somber undertaker's assistant patrolling the sidewalk hands us each a business card, and as Werle draws in his first deep drag, the fissures

on his stubbled face grow longer and darker. "Fucking psychopath in Bocas," he says, his voice a rasp. He runs a cal­loused hand through his thick hair. "Who could have thought?"

At 51, Keith Werle retains the hand­some boyishness that once gave rise to his celestial ambitions, and as he paces the sidewalk I am put in mind of the actor Aaron Eckhart in the film Thank You for Smoking, or even a young Clint Eastwood. As if reading my mind he repeats, "Fucking psychopath. I feel like I'm in a fucking movie right now. Who could have known?" He shakes his head, the words subsumed by ciga­rette smoke. But this particular movie scene has not yet played out, for when

we return to the morgue, his attorney, a brunette named Ruth Alvarado, is opening a manila envelope delivered by messenger from the Panamanian prose­cutor general's office. Inside is the latest prison deposition from the accused serial killer William Dathan Holbert, the self-proclaimed Wild Bill Cortez, the man who put Cher Hughes in her grave.

Since Holbert's arrest during a shoot-out on the San Juan River he has offered more confessions than Saint Augus­tine, each contradicting the last. Now Alvarado runs her fingertip under the sentences of this latest 11-page notarized document, translating simultaneously, mouthing some of the words in a whis­per and reading others aloud in English. Werle is in no mood. 'Jesus, Ruth, cut to the chase," he says. "What's he saying now?" Alvarado's brown eyes squint and she sucks in a breath between her teeth. "He is naming you as the hit man who hired him to kill Cher."

Ernest Hemingway would have set an ill-fated romance on the palm-fringed islands of Bocas del Toro, Elmore Leon­ard a heist. The isolated province, lapping the Caribbean in Panama's far northwestern corner, is an emerald whirl of forests that rise to the shrouded Volcan Baru, an 11,401-foot dormant volcano. In the shadow of these moun­tains a string of cays dots the Chiriqui Lagoon. When Christopher Colum­bus first spotted the archipelago on his final voyage to the New World in 1502, it reminded him of the mouth of a bull, and for the next 400 years, nothing much, save for a banana plan­tation or two, disturbed the soft rhythm of life in Bocas del Toro. Then, in the last days of the 20th century, Bocas was rediscovered—this time by the expats. The surfers came first, drawn to the breaks off the (continued on page 99)

HEMINGWAY WOULD

HAVE SET AN

ILL-FATED ROMANCE

ON THE ISLANDS OF

BOCAS DEL TORO.

WILD BILL

white-sand beaches of the east-facing islands. They were followed by American and Eu­ropean backpackers and sun worshippers. Soon enough guesthouses and hostels sprouted, tourist outfits from the States hired local Indians to run their canoe-like pangas across the bay on snorkeling excur­sions, and scuba instructors hung signs.

"When I first arrived here 10 years ago there were a couple of local Indian fish restaurants, a taverna or two and a lot of dogs fucking on Main Street," one foreign resident of the province's principal cay, Isla Colon, tells me after a day of explor­ing mangrove swamps and jungle trails. We are sitting outside a bar in downtown Bocas Town on Isla Colon. I look around. The dogs are gone.

Evoking W. Somerset Maugham's notorious homage to the Cote d'Azur—"a sunny place for shady people"—some gringos moved to Bocas to become, and remain, lost. A wealthy 65-year-old Floridian known as Mike Brown was one of them. In 2003 he and his Thai wife, Manchittha Nankratoke, and teenage son, Watson, purchased a 45-acre finca in a district known as Cauchero, at the ass end of nowhere some distance from Isla Colon. Back in Miami, Brown was wanted on a 1981 warrant for kidnapping, grand theft, posses­sion of cocaine and a prison escape under his true name, Michael Francis Salem.

Others, such as the 58-year-old former Santa Fe antiques dealer Bo Icelar, found the islands an ideal corner in which to escape money problems. Icelar—who had changed his name from Barry Eisler after declaring bankruptcy back in the States—still liked to take the occasional journey to Africa or Asia and return with a rare Hutu tribal mask or Cambodian porcelain figurine. Friends knew him as a tough albeit quiet man, a martial artist with refined tastes.

The Browns and Bo Icelar would soon be dead.

For Keith Werle and Cher Hughes, Bocas represented a new adventure. He was a kid from Flushing, Queens who had knocked around Hollywood until—in a bizarro world Harrison Ford career arc—he found his niche as a master carpenter and set designer. She had brains, beauty and a magnetic per­sonality, a businesswoman from St. Louis who had migrated to Florida to start a neon-sign business and, in her words, "make enough money to spend the rest of my life traveling the world before I'm too old."

In 1990 Werle counted his savings, pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he opened a beachside gin mill. One night a few years later Cher Hughes walked in. They fell heavily.

"We both had this restless streak, like there had to be more to life than what we were seeing and doing," Werle tells me one morning over Costa Rican coffee. "In Flor­ida, aside from our businesses, we were also making money flipping houses—buying these ramshackle places, fixing them up, selling them. I liked her idea of chucking all our stuffand just seeing the world. Then one day a friend of mine from St. Pete came

into my bar, told me he'd bought a lot on some godforsaken Panama seacoast and asked if I'd head down there to build him a house. Cher and I stepped off the plane here planning to spend a couple of days. We stayed a month and went back only to get our stuff."

Werle unloaded his bar. Hughes sold her sign-making business for $1.2 mil­lion. On tiny Isla Carenero, just across the water from Bocas Town on Isla Colon, they refurbished an "Indian shack" and added a separate four-room guesthouse. He was soon in demand as a builder, "a guy who comes in on time and on budget," as the owner of a hotel Werlc constructed told me. She was a happy gadabout, taking a partic­ular interest in the local children, handing out lollipops near the Isla Colon gram­mar school and hosting kids' movie nights. They were married in an outdoor ceremony beneath a spinney of banana and bougain-villea trees. The expat community still tells tales of the all-night party.

The two next purchased their own iso­lated "footprint" island, 2.5 acres in all, one hour south of Isla Colon by motorized panga. They erected a Swiss Family Robin­son wood home atop the small cay's steep crest, complete with two thatched-roof outer buildings, a hot tub and indoor and outdoor rainwater plumbing.

"This was our getaway," says Werle, add­ing that he and Hughes had a steady income from the Isla Carenero guesthouse. "Bocas Town and Carenero were getting old, not quite the Panama we were looking for—too many gringos, still too Americanized, even by the time we got here. I mean, both neigh­bors on either side were from Florida."

Their new island home was a mile across a small bay from the Brown family's farm in Cauchero.

In early 2008 Werle and Hughes returned to Cauchero from a vacation to discover they had new neighbors, a 30ish American cou­ple who skimmed over to their island one morning in an expensive speedboat—the same speedboat, Werle was quick to notice, in which Mike Brown always traveled.

They introduced themselves as William Adolfo and Jane Seana Cortez—"Call me Wild Bill," the man insisted in his South­ern drawl—and announced they had bought out the Browns, paying cash for the home­stead, lock, stock and barrel. Bill and Jane were odd. He was about six feet tall and close to 300 pounds, with an inflated chest set on short stubby legs, ripped biceps and platinum ringlets falling about his balloon-like head. (His bloated body and boisterous personality led Werle—and, later, many others—to peg him as a steroid freak, ana­bolics being as easy to score in Panama as cocaine.) She was short and verging on round with two dark satchels of flesh bulging beneath her eyes, an obviously once-pretty blonde going to seed. She was also careful to always remain a few steps behind her loud­mouthed husband, emitting inappropriate high-pitched giggles over nothing.

Still, Bill and Jane Cortez's presence raised no red flags. The Browns had been a private family, tending to their chickens

and a few cattle while venturing into Bocas Town only for supplies. Everyone on the islands knew their place had been on the market for months. Anyone who lived in the tropics, including Werle and Hughes, under­stood that gringos, even gringo families, often picked up and left Central America as quickly as they'd arrived. The disappear­ance of the Browns and the arrival of this new couple was par for the expat course.

Over the next several weeks Bill Cor-tez dropped by Werle and Hughes's island regularly. He boasted he was the son of a Mexican mother and a Texas cattle baron, had inherited vast wealth and was looking to get into the then-thriving Bocas del Toro real estate market. He had first tried neigh­boring Costa Rica, he said, but he felt that country was played out. Panama, and partic­ularly the Bocas islands, were "virgin turf" more to his liking.

Werle and Hughes were puzzled and somewhat amused when Wild Bill also announced his intentions to build a water­side bar and restaurant near the dock landing that led to the former Brown farm. It would be, Cortez said, "the First Tem­ple of Drunks," and he would serve as its pope. Werle could count on both hands the number of foreigners who had settled so far from Isla Colon, and he knew there was no way the local Indians, who made up the majority of the population in Cauchero, would ever be attracted to a joint serving greasy french fries and flash-fried frozen chicken wings.

"But everyone has their dream, you know," Werle recalls that morning, months later. "Even if it's nuts, it's still a dream."

Soon enough, however, nuts was one of the milder epithets the residents of Bocas began to utter about Bill and Jane Cortez, whose names had become as synonymous with misfortune as Smith &: Wesson.

"I remember going to the opening party for their restaurant, and there was just some­thing off about the whole thing," says Doug Ruscher, raising his voice over the drone of his 60-horsepower engine as he weaves his fiberglass panga around mangrove islands on the way to Cauchero. Ruscher, a former agronomist from Ohio, owns a lovely beach-side bed-and-breakfast in Bocas Town. He was also one of Bo Icelar's best friends.

"We all motored down, like today. You don't reach Cauchero by road," he says. Above us the sky is the color of brushed alu­minum, and in the near distance an Indian dives for lobster from his dugout canoe. "And, well, Bill never struck me as the type to move down here and be captured by the jungle's beauty and solitude. Anyway, here we are. Check it out for yourself."

Ruscher kills the engine and guides his panga toward a disused dock fronting a two-story hardwood structure. A pelican perches atop a bloodred rendering of a leering skull and crossbones wearing a conquistador's helmet. Beneath the image, in hand letter­ing, a sign reads casa com/.: ksi . 2009.

The three-sided bar at the end of the dock is empty. A few unopened Heineken bottles litter the plank floor. Someone has swept a small pile of chipped CDs and yellowing paperbacks into a corner amid the cigarette butts, empty liquor bottles and rotting palm

fronds. Ruscher pauses to examine a cou­ple of the books, reading the titles aloud. "Lucifer's Hammer, Killing Time." He shakes his head. "Creepy shit," he says.

"I've been living in Bocas for 10 years, which makes me something of a pioneer, I suppose. And I've seen some strange charac­ters come and go. But Wild Bill was different. He was kind of dense yet a braggart at the same time, if that makes sense. And he loved to bang off clips from his AK-47, just blast them into the sky. You'd be having a drink and suddenly blam-blam-blam.

"Told me he'd played NFL football, said he was the son of an American ambassador to Mexico. But given his pretty obvious lack of education—I mean, come on, an ambassa­dor's son?—that was hard to swallow. More like trailer trash gone bad."

Similar opinions were offered to me by expats across the islands, including a for­mer North Carolina epidemiologist and close friend of Cher Hughes's—she asked that I use only her first name, Michelle— who still lives a few miles from the Cortez compound in Cauchero.

"I went to one of their first parties—they had them almost every weekend," Michelle says one afternoon as a hard rain raps off the tin roof. "He was always out in front, the loud greeter, with all his pirate stuff and his guns. A big swinging dick. He liked to show

off his toys—his WaveRunner, his giant flat-screen TV—and he boasted he once shot an Indian he caught fishing off his dock. I didn't go over there after that. He was the type of guy for whom the word fuck was noun, verb and adjective, and he used it twice a sentence. That and the word nigger, he threw around all the time. But he never lacked for cash. Liked to flash big wads of it. Said he got rich trading gold.

"Early on, at that first party, I tried to talk to Jane. It seemed to me he didn't like her mixing or even speaking with other people. But I got her alone in the kitchen, and she told me she was a large-animal veterinarian from Texas. I had a sick dog at the time and asked if she would take a look at him. She freaked. The sweat poured out of her, and she said, 'Oh no, a dog is too small an animal for me to look at. You better find another vet.' She was as much a veterinarian as I'm the queen of Sheba."

It was in fall 2009, as Wild Bill Cortez became a fixture in the bars of Isla Colon, that Bo Icelar decided to pull up stakes. "He was just a restless guy," says his friend Ruscher. "I think he was considering mov­ing overseas, maybe to one of the places he'd visited on his antiques-hunting trips."

That November Icelar put his two-story beachfront home on Isla Colon on the mar­ket. At the same time he struck a deal with

Werle's construction outfit to redo the upper floor. When Werle and his crew arrived three days later to begin work, he was greeted at the front door by Bill Cortez.

"Same story as with the Browns," says Werle. "Told me he'd bought Bo out for cash. Said he still wanted me to do the work; he was going to fix up the house and flip it. When I went inside it was just too eerie. All Bo's clothes were still in the closet. All his artwork and antiques were still there. Lots of personal stuff, like his toothbrush. Still, like I say, it's not beyond the range of plausibil­ity that Bill gives Bo $400K in cash and Bo's on a plane the next morning with only the clothes on his back. You know: 'Here's the key; see ya.' That's life down here."

Unlike the Brown family, however, Icelar had lived near Bocas Town. He had neigh­bors, and his sudden disappearance fanned rumors that Wild Bill had been spotted lug­ging something heavy, wrapped in a blue plastic tarp, onto his speedboat the night Icelar departed. Cortez countered by tell­ing people he had purchased half a cow on Isla Colon to butcher in Cauchero.

Meanwhile, it was also around this time that Werle and Hughes's marriage began to go south. Some who knew Hughes said they could see the physical deterioration; she was putting on weight and, says a friend, her five years in Bocas had seemed to add years to

her face. The same friend accompanied her to the city of David for an appointment with a plastic surgeon. The breaking point in her relationship with Werle came one Septem­ber night when Hughes, drinking heavily, stuck a saw ed-off shotgun to his chest over a perceived slight. He moved out and rented a room on Isla Colon the next day. That Christmas was the first they'd spent apart since they'd met. Three months later, in March 2010, Cher Hughes vanished.

Thirty-one-year-old William Dathan Hol-bert and his wife, Laura Michelle Reese, 27—a.k.a. William Adolfo and Jane Cortez— were pegged as lowlifes pretty much from the start by nearly everyone with whom they had come into contact. Acquaintances and former co-workers have described both of them as avid weight lifters. He is a former North Car­olina high school football player, she a former gym rat for whom Holbert left his wife and three children. He is also an avowed white supremacist with a large swastika tattoo on his upper back and another, engraved aryan i'ridk, on his arm. In 2002 the Southern Pov­erty Law Center cited him as a rising star in the western North Carolina branch of the neo-Nazi National Alliance organization. A year later, according to the center's investiga­tors, he arrived at a white nationalist cookout claiming to represent a new racist group.

During this period Holbert also opened a business in Forest City, North Carolina. The storefront, frequented by skinheads, sold books, CDs and pamphlets promoting white supremacy in the South and hosted speeches by regional leaders of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Moreover, his pen­chant for selling other people's properties was not unique to his tenure in Panama.

In 2005 Holbert was wanted for stealing a car in Montana, forging the vehicle title and reselling it. In early 2006 a North Carolina warrant was issued for Holbert's arrest after he obtained a false license and posed as a doctor in order to forge a deed to a house belonging to an elderly female retiree. He subsequently sold the house, and he and his wife used the $200,000 profit to flee to Kentucky under assumed names. There they purchased another home, vaca­tioned in Ireland and traveled across the U.S. Southwest, looking for sites to open a gym, they told people. Sensing the U.S. Marshals Service's Fugitive Task Force was closing in on them, they fled Kentucky. A few days later they were pulled over by a Wyoming highway patrolman who had run the plates on a vehicle stolen in West Virginia, but Holbert managed to lose the policeman in a high-speed chase.

Investigators suspect that Holbert and Reese began the first leg of their journey to Central America via a 14-foot U-Haul truck stolen in Bismarck, North Dakota and found abandoned in North Palm Beach, Florida. Their first stop was Costa Rica, a country from which, Panamanian police say, they also fled under mysterious circumstances surrounding a missing lawyer from whom they had rented a house.

Holbert and Reese have never been charged with a homicide in the U.S., and the FBI refuses to comment on any federal

murder investigations it may be conducting in the States, other than to say the couple is "cooperating" with Panamanian authorities. Yet the former head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, serial-killer hunter William Hagmaier, tells me it would not surprise him if Holbert's U.S. rap sheet was a mere prelude to the discovery of "even more hei­nous crimes in America." He adds, "People in their 30s don't just suddenly decide to become serial killers."

No one in Bocas del Toro, naturally, had any idea of this backstory when the Browns, Bo Icelar and Cher Hughes went missing. Cortez told people Hughes had decided to sell her island home as well as the properties on Isla Carenero after falling in love with a man she'd met in Panama City. She had, he added, made the deal with him, again for cash, the night before joining her new lover on his sailboat for a long sea voyage. Werle did not buy it. When he confronted Cortez about his belongings still on the island in Cauchero—construction equipment, fish­ing gear, a couple of generators—Cortez told him that per his contract with Hughes, everything was now his. This included Werle and Hughes's two shih tzus and their brown Doberman. Werle knew his wife would never leave her dogs in the hands of this couple.

Moreover, unlike the Browns and Icelar, Werle and I lughes had placed their proper­ties in a legal trust in Hughes's name. Werle demanded to see the contract Cortez said he had signed with her. Cortez countered that he and Hughes had also signed a con­fidentiality agreement. If Werle didn't like it he could take it up with Hughes upon her return, whenever that might be. The next day, in Bocas Town, Cortez tracked down Werle and threw one of the shih tzus at him. The dog was emaciated and near death.

Meanwhile, Werle and Hughes's houses on Isla Carenero across the narrow strait from Isla Colon were receiving the full Casa Cortez pirate makeover. Cortez fired the longtime property manager, installed his own and put the rooms up for rent. Out front he erected a sign—white lettering on a bloodred background and illustrated with the by now familiar skull and crossbones in conquistador helmet—labeling the guest­house A DELIGHTFULLY WICKED PLACE. On the

small private dock he placed another hand-lettered warning, in English and Spanish, in the same color scheme: parking and/or touching may rksul.t in death. In case this message was not clear, he added, trespassers and/or thieves may be executed.

Prior to Hughes's disappearance Werle and she had continued to text each other fairly often. "The usual love-hate stuff after a breakup," he says. " 'I still love you,' 'No, I hate you.' 'You're a dick.' 'No, you're not.' But then the texts just stopped. Then there was her family. They contacted me, wanted to know if I knew where she was. You see, she missed her father's birthday. She always called him on his birthday.

"A couple of days after I had the confron­tation with Bill about getting my stuffback, the texts started again, but their flavor had changed. Misspellings. Messages all in cap­ital letters. Words Cher would never use. Other friends of ours were getting the same kind of texts. They were from her iPhone,

but I knew it wasn't her. That was the first time I thought she might be dead, that Bill had killed her."

Werle was at a loss. He went to the Isla Colon police, but, as he puts it, drawing on an analogy from his youth in New York, "that was like asking the Montauk PD to investigate a string of gang homicides in the Bronx. They just weren't equipped. They were used to handling domestic disputes, shoplifting, small drug deals."

Cortez, meanwhile, learned that Werle had approached the authorities. Soon thereafter Werle's friends and associates around Bocas started to warn him of threats Cortez was making.

"I'd run into people who would tell me that Bill was going around town saying he was going to 'get that motherfucker Werle for slandering' him."

Werle moved out of his rented house and into a hotel that employed a 24-hour secu­rity guard.

"I was scared shitless. I'm waiting for this guy to pull up one day at the dock and blow my brains out. He'd said as much. And there's still no sign of Cher. By now the texts had stopped."

Then, in July, another friend—the wife of the man who had originally brought Werle to Bocas to build his house—called. She told him that an American expat with a popular blog in Panama City was posting questions about Bill and Jane Cortez. His name was Don Winner and he was looking into the discov­ery of the body of a Costa Rican lawyer who had rented his home to the Cortezes. Werle called Winner that afternoon and boarded a puddle jumper to the capital to meet him the next day. Coincidentally, Hughes's aunt and sister had also flown into the country to investigate her disappearance.

"I was just on a fishing expedition, see­ing if anyone knew anything about Wild Bill," Winner would tell me later. "Some­thing didn't smell right. All the people were

disappearing, and the common denomina­tor was this asshole Cortez."

Winner advised Werle and Hughes's rel­atives to file a missing person's report with the U.S. embassy in Panama City but not to hope for any American investigative assis­tance for a disappeared gringo. Werle and the Hughes women went to the national police headquarters to file against Cortez what the Panama judicial system terms an official denuncia, a sort of accusatory sworn deposition. Panama's laws prevented Werle from accusing Cortez of Hughes's murder— there was no body. But Winner explained to him that he might get all of Cortez's prop­erties searched if he had proof that the American had broken Panamanian laws. Werle remembered Wild Bill's fondness for spraying off clips from his AK-47. Assault rifles are illegal in Panama.

It unraveled swiftly. Werle's denuncia was enough for a judge to issue a warrant to search the Cortez properties. When a team of detec­tives arrived in Bocas a few days later, on July 20, Bill and Jane were nowhere to be found. Since Werle had instigated the investiga­tion, the authorities asked him to accompany them to the former Brown family farm. When the group arrived in Cauchero by boat, Werle and Hughes's brown Dober-man, Jackie, was sitting on the dock.

"You know Dobermans aren't big water dogs, right?" Werle asks me, the amazement in his voice still evident months later. "He swam the mile from our island—apparently he was doing it every day and Bill had to keep returning him—and he's sitting there on the dock, whimpering."

The house was turned upside down. The toilet had overflowed, and dirty dishes and used syringes littered the kitchen. Clothes were strewn across floors, and three (coun­terfeit) passports in the name "Brown" were discovered in a desk drawer. A small jar of

gold-capped teeth, apparently ripped from someone's mouth, sat on a window ledge above the kitchen sink. As the search party moved across the living room, one of the police officers nearly tripped over a glass. The glass rolled to a corner and came to rest against a filthy towel. Under the towel a detective found Cher Hughes's passport.

Outside, Jackie the Doberman was in distress. Several times he dashed part way up the steep hill beyond the house before returning to the yard with a yelp. Finally, with the dog howling ever louder, Werle and the police decided to follow him. Jackie led them on a dirt path up the hill and began circling an old garbage pit. Creeping fire-red Holy Ghost orchids, Panama's national flower, emitted a sweet odor. The dog pawed at the ground. The police plunged spades and shovels into the jungle floor. Jackie had led them to Cher Hughes's grave.

Another team of officers began digging through nearby garbage pits. Bo Icelar's skeleton, later identified through dental records, was buried in one. The skeletal remains of the Brown family were dug out of another. The coroner later determined that Icelar and the Brown wife and teen­age son had been shot at close range in the back of the head. It was difficult to tell what had killed Michael Brown. His head remains missing. Many in Bocas remember Brown—despite his secretive nature—for his distinctive mouthful of gold teeth.

"Is your office investigating Keith Werle as a suspect in the murder of Cheryl Hughes?"

Angel Calderon awaits the translation of my question into Spanish despite the fact that he understands perfectly well what I said. The Panamanian prosecutor general is fluent in several languages, including English, but formalities must be adhered to. Ruth Alvarado, Werle's attorney, is this afternoon acting as my translator in Cal-deron's office in Panama City. She repeats the question. The prosecutor's head begins to shake before she has finished speaking.

Calderon says in Spanish, "It has not been established that other people besides William Holbert and his wife collaborated in these crimes. So no."

"And Holbert's contention that Bocas del Toro is a hotbed of drug smuggling, gun-running, pedophilia, money laundering and human trafficking run by an inter­national organized crime syndicate that includes Keith Werle? A 'Mafia' that hired him to commit these five murders?"

A hint of a smile cracks one corner of Calderon's mouth. He is a handsome man in his mid-40s, with thick gelled black hair and a glint in his eye that I have seen in other men who put people in jail for a liv­ing. He pushes his chair away from his polished wood desk, stands and tugs at the shirtsleeves of his perfectly starched white dress shirt. This time he does not wait for Alvarado's translation.

"The deaths of the five Americans benefit only one person, William Holbert," he says. "His intention was to keep the money and property he stole for himself. There is no major element of evidence to back up his accusations of organized crime."

Calderon speaks precisely, cautiously. Panamanian police and prosecutors have never before dealt with a serial killer, and the country's news media have inflamed this case to white heat. They also, in a way, abetted in the capture of the couple known as Wild Bill and Jane Cortez. As Calderon explains the time line to me, when the Holberts learned Keith Werle had contacted the Panamanian National Police, they fled Bocas, crossing illegally into Costa Rica. They were looking at rental properties in that country, per­haps shopping for more victims, when they were recognized from news reports. The two had not counted on the media frenzy that would ensue after the discov­ery of five bodies in Bocas del Toro.

On the run again, they holed up in a

rented cabin near the San Juan River that separates Costa Rica from Nicaragua before hiring a boat­man to ferry them across. The owner of the cabin recog­nized them from television reports and notified authori­ties. When their boat was flagged down at a Costa Rican river checkpoint, Cortez tossed the boatman overboard, took the helm and made for the mouth of Nica­ragua's Sarapiqui River. A Nicaraguan army patrol boat gave chase. The couple surrendered when a stream of automatic weapons fire from the patrol boat arced over their bow. Within days Nicaraguan author­ities, happy to be rid of the two freak­ish gringo killers, extradited them to Panama, where they now sit in solitary confinement in sep­arate prisons.

As Panama has no death penalty, Calde-ron tells me with a certainty inherent to prosecutors the world over that Holbert will be tried and convicted for five mur­ders and sentenced to 50 years in prison. His wife will be tried as an accomplice, and depending on what evidence the ongoing investigation turns up, will serve either a 25-year bit or a 50-year bit as a primary accessory. There are, in Calderon's world, no other options.

Once in jail Holbert began his string of confessions—officially to Panamanian pros­ecutors and unofficially to several local media outlets, including a rambling late-night phone call to Don Winner. In these he has become increasingly whiny and paranoid, complaining about the lack of regular meals, the confines of his cell, the

incompetence of his public defender and alleged shakedowns by his prison guards.

He also teases out tidbits of conspiracy theories. He admits to the five slayings, for instance, but swears his wife had nothing to do with them. He says he will "blow the lid" off the Bocas crime cartel only when Jane is safely back in the States. He has also issued veiled pleas to the United States government to begin extradition hearings.

Of this last, says an American source in the embassy in Panama City, "Put yourself in his place and balance the ideas of walk­ing the yard in a stateside federal pen with his Aryan Nation pals and watching big-screen TVs in the rec room, versus a gringo with Nazi and Klan tattoos being thrown into a general population that's 90 percent black in Central America."

As for his repeated bids to obtain his wife's release, Calderon is succinct. "Mis wife knows where the stolen money is; we believe there is a substantial amount remaining. Money can pay for lawyers and buy favors in any prison."

When I ask Calderon if there is a chance he will ever turn this case over to American jus­tice, the smile again creases his mouth. "No, that will not happen," he says.

During our meeting Calderon also adds various heretofore unknown details to the Holberts' execution spree. The actual take from the Brown killings, he says, was well north of half a million dol­lars. Some of it, however, was stashed in Hong Kong bank accounts. He believes Holbert tortured Brown to get the account numbers—accounting for Mike Brown's

missing head and the jar of gold teeth. When the Brown money began to dwin­dle, he adds, it was on to Bo Icelar, who did not have the cash Holbert and his wife expected. Thus the Hughes murder fol­lowing so swiftly. Hughes's autopsy, he tells me, indicates she was tied by the wrists before being executed—this also consti­tutes torture under Panamanian law—and was likely shot in Molbert's boat as he took her to the Brown farm.

As the American embassy source tells me, "Panama may not have a death penalty, but they'll convict. That's when the death countdown starts for Wild Bill among all those prisoners."

On my final trip to Cauchero I dropped by

the larm Wild Bill and Jane Cortez stole from the Brown family. It was still a crime scene, and two local police officers, whose facial features suggested Indian heritage, toted American-made M-16 rifles. They eyed me warily from the dock as my panga floated up. When I explained my purpose they offered to let me into the house—it was still a pigsty—and pointed me in the direction of the steep hillside that led to the graves of the five American expats. The police would permit me to inspect the graves at the top of the hill but declined to accom­pany me. They eyed my flip-flops with grins and conversed in Spanish I barely understood. I did catch one word, how­ever—"bushmaster." They considered my white gringo toes suitable as lunch for these thick-bodied venomous snakes,

the largest pit vipers in the world, which inhabit the Panamanian jungle.

It was only at the end of my visit that I noticed the two policemen had pitched tents on the dock. When I asked why they slept and cooked outside, they hesitated for a moment before admitting they believed the place was haunted. They heard noises, like human cries and screams at night, the most frightful sounds one could imagine.

"A lot of Panamanians, particularly coun­try people, still hold a deep belief and deep fear of witches and goblins and ogres," my translator explained with a shrug. I was not so quick to dismiss the thought. It occurred to me that these Panamanian specters had nothing on Wild Bill Cortez.