Cartoon Creator's Grisly Murder

But who would have imagined the spanking sessions? Whenever a guest arrived, Shalleck would crank up the music — sometimes opera or soul — to mask the howls of a man getting his tail whipped.

Standing in her Florida room, Denise is just six feet from the driveway where Shalleck's battered body was dragged and abandoned after the assault. The Zajacs say they didn't hear or see any signs of a struggle the Super Bowl Sunday their neighbor was killed. And nobody noticed Shalleck's corpse, covered with black garbage bags next to his blue Honda, until Tuesday.

Across the street, 80-year-old Russell Hall remembers his wife, Charlotte, who passed away in 2006, intuiting the moment she met Shalleck that he was gay. "We're both pretty broad-minded people. She liked him, and so did I.... He was closet gay, I guess. He never discussed it with us."

At least once a week, the Halls would entertain Shalleck with a cocktail or two — vodka tonic with lime. He'd unload negative thoughts that had him feeling down, and the Halls would try to cheer him up. He was envious of the couple's adoring relationship with each other and their kids. "He wasn't too happy with his life, the way it had gone," Hall recalls.

Shalleck often came bearing gifts: souvenirs from his travels or presents around the holidays. The last Christmas gift, a ceramic jazz pianist and drummer, sits in the corner of Hall's TV room. Hall squints his pale-blue eyes as he reflects on the fate of his friend. "Too bad he had to get hooked up into that stuff — the gay lifestyle. Course, he could have been straight as a die and still had that happen. You never know in this day and age. There are a lot of predators out there."

Jim Sirman shudders to think he might have been at Shalleck's house the night of the murder. Could he have prevented the crime? Or would he have been killed too? The diminutive 56-year-old already had a date Super Bowl Sunday, so he had turned down Shalleck's invitation. Sirman made plans to meet Monday night instead, but then he couldn't reach his play pal by phone. This was odd. Sirman says Shalleck was usually so eager before a play date he would phone several times that day to confirm the encounter. It was a 50-mile drive to Boynton Beach from his home in Davie; Sirman decided not to make the trip.

Sirman rang Shalleck again Tuesday, and a Boynton Beach homicide detective returned the call. "My heart sank," he recalls. "I knew it had to be about Alan."

The two men, both divorcees and fathers, met through a loose-knit South Florida spanking club of roughly 20 men. At first, Sirman says, he was turned off by Shalleck. He seemed pushy, aggressive. One time Sirman even saw him jump into an ongoing role-play game between two men at a spanking party; such uninvited interruptions are a big no-no in the fetish community.

But a persistent Shalleck phoned him perhaps 10 times until finally the younger man agreed to meet for a private, one-on-one session. Sirman inquired about health problems and established safe words: green for go, yellow to slow down, and red for stop. They got together perhaps three times before Shalleck was killed. Sirman says he gets off hearing older men moan, scream, and squirm under his flat hand or the swift swat of a paddle. And Shalleck liked to be dominated. The sessions would go on for hours. "He had one of the toughest bottoms I've ever seen," Sirman remembers. "It was like leather, his ass."

Members of the spanking club, spooked by the homicide, disbanded for a while. Beating one another relentlessly was suddenly unappealing after one of their brethren got pummeled and knifed to death. Those living in the closet were so terrified of being outed after police came knocking at their doors to ask about Shalleck that they never returned to the club.

Gossip began to circulate in Fort Lauderdale's large gay community about the two men who confessed to the murder, Rex Ditto and Vincent Puglisi. Some wondered whether the duo might have been responsible for unsolved murders in the area.

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Vincent Puglisi, a 54-year-old fast-food cashier, and his unemployed 29-year-old lover, Rex Ditto, were about to be evicted from their Oakland Park home when they decided to visit Shalleck in early 2006. The men had been dating for only a month. Both had prison records, Puglisi for burglary and Ditto for assault and arson.

Combing through a list of recent incoming phone calls to Alan Shalleck, Boynton Beach Police found three from Puglisi — who showed up for questioning with cuts all over his hands.

Ditto appeared wearing sneakers with soles that matched a bloody print at the crime scene, and a Fossil wristwatch that belonged to Shalleck. By Wednesday evening, just 36 hours after the body was discovered, the pair had confessed.