Crime Seen (6 page)

There was also another reason why I felt it was time for a change. In the past I had dated several officers I’d met on the job and was now dating Bob, whom I’d worked with on my previous UC project. It didn’t seem to be a problem for him that I was away so much of the time as he was still working long hours as a UC himself. But for the first time in my career I wanted to concentrate on my personal life more than my job.

Once all the arrests were made and my Kingston project was over, Bob and I took a three-week vacation to the United Kingdom to spend some time together. For the most part it was a very relaxing vacation, with one exception. On our last leg of the trip in Northern England, several uniformed local constabulary officers showed up at 6:00 a.m. outside our hotel room door. The officers advised me that I was under investigation for assisting in a prison break the night before. Bob and I gave them permission to search our room and we were escorted to the hotel restaurant downstairs to wait.

An officer eventually came to speak to us. He was full of apologies. It turned out a woman closely matching my description had assisted several prisoners break out of a nearby penitentiary the evening before. Although I knew I had done nothing wrong, it was nonetheless a stressful few hours and certainly eye-opening to experience the other side of the law.

Soon after Bob and I returned home from vacation, I got word that, after several past unsuccessful attempts, I’d finally passed the promotional exam to become a corporal. In 1986 only a few OPP policewomen had been promoted and I took the first position offered to me in Anti-Rackets Branch. Since I’d never really been that good with numbers, it might not have appeared the logical next step in my career, but I was anxious to get my corporal’s “stripes.” I was assigned to work on cheque and credit card–related frauds, counterfeit currency and later was transferred into the major frauds unit. I struggled with the complex nature of property flips and misappropriations of corporate and government funds, but my co-workers were all supportive. Many took time away from their own cases to help me make sense of hundreds of documents and spreadsheets. Like so many other crime games, these ones were all about manipulating the trust of another. The only difference was that these bad guys wore suits.

I had one break from working these paper-laden numbers cases when I was asked to assist the OPP’s Criminal Investigation Branch on a serial sexual assault case. I had never worked on a violent crime case before and jumped at the chance. My job was to re-interview victims in a series of sexual assaults that had occurred in the city of Windsor and other communities in southern Ontario over a period of about five years. The most recent incident had just occurred a few weeks before. The lead investigator wanted me and a woman from the local Rape Crisis Centre to speak with the victims in case anything had been missed earlier. He was also hoping that having two women do the interviews might yield previously undisclosed information.

What made the interviews particularly difficult was the ages of the victims, which ranged from sixty-one to eighty-three. The impact of these types of attacks is severe for any victim, but these older women suffered greatly not only emotionally but also physically. Several were unable to return to their homes after being attacked. One had such an aggressive onset of Alzheimer’s disease after she was attacked that she could not be re-interviewed. All of the other women expressed their thanks for us coming to speak with them and said that it had been easier to speak with women, especially about embarrassing sexual details. Visiting them to take their statements was like sitting down with one’s own grandmother. Tea or coffee was served, usually along with some cookies. One showed us blankets she was making for her grandchildren to “help her forget.” We left several interviews with bags of fresh vegetables from their gardens.

It would not be till 1998, more than seventeen years after the first vicious attack, that a DNA break would finally come in the case, and lead to the arrest of forty-five-year-old Dayle Grayer for four assaults, the last occurring just weeks before he was apprehended. He was later found guilty and declared a dangerous offender, the finding reserved for Canada’s most violent criminals and sexual predators, and sentenced to an indeterminate period of incarceration. While justice was done, by that time all but one of the victims had passed away.

In terms of my personal path, that case was a huge turning point—it would inspire me to redirect my career toward working violent crime cases. As horrible as the crimes were, I felt I had helped some of the victims to better cope with what they’d gone through and was also able to collect investigative information that had not previously been known. It was time to go back to perusing the bulletin board for new job postings that could get me into this line of work.

Several months later a new position in the OPP was posted with the successful candidate required to attend a violent crime course hosted by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The candidate was to have a college degree and superior skills in criminal investigation, verbal and written communications, and had to be willing to attend the course that would entail at least ten months away from home.

Bob was then working full-time for Toronto’s anti-biker squad and we’d moved in together. I worried that this time such an extended absence would screw up the first serious relationship I’d ever had. And there was someone else I wanted to keep in my life too. Bob had a teenaged daughter, Cheryl, from his first marriage, and she and I were starting to develop a really great relationship. Although I always thought I’d have kids of my own, my biological clock was winding down and I was running out of time. Cheryl was everything I could have hoped for in a daughter so I was content with the decision that Bob and I wouldn’t have any kids together. I worried about leaving the two of them for almost a year but they were both supportive so I submitted my application the next day. I was shortlisted for an interview along with four others. A few days later I got the call and received the news that I was the successful candidate. I was going to be trained to be a criminal personality profiler … whatever that was.

EXIT 148

“When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1990
, I made the ten-hour drive in my unmarked cruiser, south to Quantico. The FBI Academy was about forty miles south of Washington, DC, and inside the one hundred square miles of Marine Corps Base Quantico. It was just about dark when I took Exit 148 off Interstate 95 and drove the last five miles of my journey. The road wound past Marine Corps munitions buildings and long-arm sniper ranges intermittently cut out of dense woods. Several times my headlights lit up the green eyes of wild deer in the ditches, their movements momentarily frozen, as I drove by. I passed a military police cruiser parked on the right side of the road with radar set up and car pulled over. I would come to know they took their base speed limits very seriously.

I wasn’t even aware that the FBI had a uniform contingent until I drove up to a checkpoint guardhouse right outside the Academy. A young officer, with “FBI POLICE” on the shoulder of his shirt, stepped out and asked to see some identification and my paperwork inviting me to attend the course. He handed me a parking pass good for a spot in front of my dormitory.

I checked in at the reception desk on the ground floor of Jefferson Dorm. Above the desk was a huge FBI seal hanging on the wall with its motto, “FIDELITY, BRAVERY, INTEGRITY.” I received an ID tag giving me access to all the Academy buildings and free dining hall meals. I took the elevator up to the ninth floor and was relieved to find I had a private room and my own bathroom. I took a walk down the hall and found open doors to three rooms occupied by other international police fellows who were taking the same training as me. Two were from Australia state police agencies, Bronwyn Killmier and Claude Minisini, and one from Holland, Carlo Schippers, with the Dutch National Police.

I was impressed and a little intimidated by the amount of violent crime investigation experience my international colleagues had. But what I brought to the table was a different kind of asset: I had wheels. We were about eight miles from the nearest store or restaurant and no one else had a car. It took no persuasion to get them to help me unload my cruiser. They all had arrived by plane with only a couple of suitcases each. I never travel light to go anywhere, except when threatened with an airline fee for extra luggage. My classmates seemed glad about how close my parking spot was to the dorm, since they didn’t have very far to lug my suitcases, boxes, hanging bags of clothes, electric cooler, television and bicycle.

The next morning I awoke to the continuous sound of gunfire. Looking out my window, I saw that my room overlooked a multitude of outdoor firing ranges. I later learned that the ranges expended about a million rounds of ammunition a month. There would be no dispute about that number from me.

The four of us international fellows went to breakfast in the cafeteria and then returned to the reception area to meet up with our three American classmates: Paul Gebicke, United States Secret Service; Joe Chisholm, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and Gary Plank, Nebraska State Patrol. Our FBI police fellowship coordinator, Supervisory Special Agent Ed Sulzbach, soon joined us. He was a former New York City schoolteacher who joined the FBI in 1972. Before coming to Quantico, he’d worked extensively in undercover drug investigations and motorcycle gang infiltrations. Ed and I had a lot in common and he assured me that my past undercover work, getting up close to criminal minds, would be helpful to me as a profiler as it had been to him.

FBI Police Fellowship Graduates, 1991
Front: Claude Minisini, me, Bronwyn Killmier, Joe Chisholm; Back: Paul Gibicke, Gary Plank, Carlo Schippers

The first order of business was for the seven of us to get a tour of the Academy. The original Quantico facility was established in the 1930s and was used just for firearms training. All other FBI training had been conducted in Washington until the Quantico complex of buildings opened on over three hundred acres at the west end of the marine base. The twenty-plus buildings of the Academy were connected by ground-level enclosed glass corridors, a.k.a. “gerbil tubes.” A number of times over the next months, I’d be walking in a tube and see a “not so wild” deer grazing just a few feet away and looking in at me. They would not so much as flinch at the constant sound of gunfire all around them.

Ed explained that the students we were passing in the halls included new agents with the FBI and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Both groups were at the Academy for several months of basic agent training which included academic instruction in the particular laws they would enforce, techniques of investigation, defensive tactics and firearms training. They both also had rigorous physical fitness programs.

None of them were wearing uniform shirts or stripes down the sides of their pants. Nor did I ever see any of them marching like I did as a rookie in training. These agents were dressed in uniforms of collared golf shirts, navy blue for FBI and black for DEA, and khakis. Most of them carried briefcases. Some of them even carried laptop computers, which I had never seen before. (I remember saying to Bronwyn that I was confident I could finish my career in policing without ever having to use a computer.) The professionalism required of these new recruits was clearly demonstrated as each time we met one in the hall we were greeted with a nod and “Ma’am” and the men with “Sir.” Bronwyn and I joked that it made us feel like a couple of old broads.

In the past the FBI had had a hiring freeze of female agents, thanks to J. Edgar Hoover. Within a few short weeks of his becoming FBI director in 1924, he ordered that the only two women working in the bureau resign. Somehow one female agent slipped through and was hired that same year, but she resigned a few years later. Hoover remained the FBI director until his death in May 1972. Two months later, after forty-four years, women were welcomed into the organization once again.

There were several other groups of students at the Academy at any one time—the largest student body was actually American and foreign police officers participating in a program known as the National Academy. The approximately 250 officers (about 5 percent of them women) were all dressed in red shirts and were there for eleven weeks of academic and physical training.

The National Academy students could take undergraduate and graduate courses in US and international law, forensic science, leadership development, communication, and health and fitness. They were also offered the opportunity to take courses on the application of behavioural science to criminal investigations. I was excited to hear that my group were always invited to sit in on any of the classes. What I ended up learning in those classes would be some of the most valuable training that I’d receive over my entire policing career.