The show started with a picture pulled from a magazine. It showed Spencer Harding standing in his art gallery. Hanging on the walls were paintings worth millions, but Harding seemed oblivious to their presence. His suit screamed power, as did his stance. He glared at the camera with his arms crossed, as if warning it to keep its distance.
This evening on Newsnight: Spencer Harding was the undisputed king of the New York art world. Over the course of two decades, he rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and influential dealer in Manhattan—some might even say the world. Brilliant, handsome, and phenomenally wealthy, he counted the world’s richest men as his friends and clients. Those who worked with Spencer say he was gifted with impeccable taste and an uncanny eye for talent. None of his colleagues or clients ever suspected Spencer Harding was hiding a sinister secret—or that the beachside mansion where he threw glamorous parties also doubled as a slaughterhouse, to which he lured innocent young women before robbing them of their lives.
“Jesus Christ. They’re making him sound like a James Bond villain,” Jo groaned as the show’s title sequence rolled. “Do we really have to watch this shit?”
Nessa paused the television and turned to Jo. “Yes,” she said. “We do.”
“Here.” Harriett passed her joint to Jo. “This will help.”
Jo took the joint. Art would recognize the smell when he got home from the movies with Lucy, but under the circumstances, she knew he wouldn’t hold it against her.
Jo inhaled deeply as the show’s host appeared on the screen. The wind tousled his silvery hair as behind him waves crashed onto Danskammer Beach.
Spencer Harding’s downfall began on a sunny morning in the final days of spring. That’s when three local women stopped here on this lonesome road that runs along Danskammer Beach, just outside the picture-perfect town of Mattauk, New York. They told police they were out for a walk by the shore. What they discovered, just off a narrow trail that snakes down to the water, would shake two communities to their core. By the end of the summer, both Spencer Harding and his wife, famed diver Rosamund Stillgoe Harding, would be dead. The bodies of three young women would be lying in the county morgue. And headlines would be fixated on the man who’s become known around the world as the Collector.
“What?” The pot hadn’t done much to mellow Jo’s mood. “The only paper that called him the Collector was the fucking New York Post.” Other media hadn’t dared follow suit. Jo, Harriett, and Nessa had made it clear from the beginning that they would only grant interviews to outlets that agreed to a set of conditions Jo had typed up. Condition number one: No comic book nicknames.
“I’d prepare myself for a few more unpleasant surprises, if I were you,” Harriett told her.
“Why?” Jo demanded. “What do you know?”
“I know how the world works,” Harriett responded.
Jo rolled her eyes. “Fine. Don’t tell me.” A picture appeared on the screen—an average-looking child who showed no signs of growing into a man as conventionally handsome as Spencer Harding had been. “Oh, great, here comes the supervillain’s origin story.”
“Shhh!” Nessa shushed her.
Spencer Harding was born John Anderson, the only child of a Manhattan orthodontist. He spent the first fifteen years of his life in this middle-class building on the Upper West Side. At three bedrooms, the family’s apartment was spacious by New York standards, but hardly ostentatious. Classmates from P.S. 333 remember young John as a studious, sensitive child with a passion for art. He’s said to have started his own collection at the age of ten, purchasing a work that would one day be valued at over six million dollars.
But John Anderson’s idyllic childhood wasn’t to last. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, his parents were murdered in a tragic home invasion. The killers were never captured. John received a small fortune in life insurance, which was placed in a trust he could claim when he turned eighteen. He lived with a classmate’s family until he graduated from high school. Then, John Anderson disappeared.