Journey into Darkness (37 page)

The second purpose was to help the prosecution explain the motive for murder by providing them with analysis from a behavioral perspective that they could explain to the jury. As soon as Williams had described the case to me over the phone, and then I got a chance to review the complete file, I knew that Sedley Alley’s version of events didn’t make sense. He had said the death was an accident, that he had no intent to injure her. That, in a word, was bullshit.

First of all, this was a generally organized type of crime, similar in some ways to what I’d seen from Wayne Williams. The murder itself was mixed—with elements of both organization and disorganization—indicating to me that in spite of her strategic disadvantage, Suzanne must have put up a hell of a fight. This was a ballsy, resourceful abduction, practically right under the noses of authorities. To disable and neutralize someone in the condition Suzanne was in, even
for someone as large and strong as Alley, he’d need the element of surprise so he could quickly blitz her. After that, he just as quickly got her into the car and figured out a way to get her off base, even though two Marine joggers were running after him as fast as they could. He got her past the security gate and took her directly to a place he knew he wouldn’t be interrupted. You just don’t start out your criminal career creating a crime this brutal. He had to have had prior experience. I was therefore not surprised when Williams told me his suspicions both that Alley had strangled his first wife and that he might be responsible for two other murders in California similar in style to the Collins killing, although he was never charged with these crimes.

Second, the crime was clearly of the category Special Agent Roy Hazelwood and I had defined in an article entitled “The Lust Murderer” that we had written for the April 1980 issue of the
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
. Typically, these killings are heterosexual and intraracial in nature and are so defined because they involve mutilation or torture of genital areas. While the abduction itself was clearly a crime of opportunity, there was no way Alley’s breaking off the tree limb and thrusting it up between his victim’s legs while she was still alive (as the autopsy report showed) was anything other than the premeditated, sexualized rage of a sociopath intent on having his own way.

As we said in the article: “The lust murder is premeditated in the obsessive fantasies of the perpetrator. Yet, the killer may act on the ’spur-of-the-moment’ when the opportunity presents itself. That is to say, the murderer has precisely planned the crime in his fantasies, but has not consciously decided to act out those fantasies until the moment of the crime. Consequently, the victim is typically unknown to the killer.”

In the article, we divided lust murderers into two broad categories: organized nonsocial and disorganized asocial. Though we don’t use the nonsocial and asocial of these terms much any longer, the Collins murder case was the work of the first variety for many reasons, including the fact that the trauma was mainly induced before death rather than postmortem.

There is some confusion with the term “lust murder,”
since it doesn’t really involve lust in the way we normally think of it. Sedley Alley hadn’t been lusting after Suzanne Collins; as far as we know, he’d never seen her before. And the fact that there may be no actual sexual assault or penile penetration of the vagina doesn’t mean this is not a sexualized act. In the criminal mind, sex takes many forms. David Berkowitz, who shot his victims and never touched them, admitted that he would later go back to the murder scenes and masturbate, thinking about what he had done. Both in Berkowitz’s case and Alley’s, I knew what I was seeing here was a sexualized manifestation of power from an individual who, under normal circumstances, had none. The blood found on Alley’s shorts, signifying that he had rubbed up against her genital area after killing her, spoke to that.

While certainly sadistic, Alley was not what we would characterize as a sexual sadist, per se. As opposed to someone like Paul Bernardo in Toronto, he was not sexually aroused from the infliction of pain. Though she was beaten severely with blunt force, Suzanne wasn’t burned or whipped so that her attacker could get off on hearing her scream. Though her nipple was bitten as an act of general hostility, her attacker didn’t use pliers or other instruments of torture on her as Lawrence Bittaker had done to his victims. Alley’s motivation lay elsewhere.

There had been a precipitating event in the killer’s life prior to the attack. And the brutality against a total stranger—the pummeling, the stripping, the unspeakable cruelty with the tree limb—all that represented displaced anger, projected hostility against someone else. Since all of these types have inadequate personalities, it also served as a substitute for his inability to approach women in a mature and confident manner. When NIS agents searched Alley’s house, one of the items they found in his tool box was a mail-order penis enlarger.

As we wrote of the lust killer: “He would be described as a trouble-maker and a manipulator of people, concerned only for himself. He experiences difficulties with family, friends and ’authority figures’ through anti-social acts which may include homicide. It is the nonsocial’s aim to get even with society.”

James Clayton Lawson, the killer (as opposed to the rapist)
of the Odom and Lawson serial murder team, explained in an interview, “I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist.” If he destroys the victim, he becomes, in effect, her sole possessor.

Often in these types of crimes, the instrument used on the victim is found prominently displayed at the crime scene. In the Collins case, it couldn’t have been any more prominent.

The assertion that Alley had inserted the stick to stage it as a sexual crime was patently ridiculous. Aside from witness statements about Suzanne’s scream, the nature of the damage to internal organs showed that the stick was inserted with considerable force three or four times. You don’t do that if you’re staging. You put it in and get the hell out.

What I wanted to get across to the prosecution team was that they had an angry and frustrated man with a tremendous amount of rage at life in general and women in particular, who tried to blunt his anger with drugs and alcohol, and who, on that particular night, was not going to put up with any frustration. When this pretty young runner wasn’t immediately receptive to him—or if he only perceived that, as she may not actually have had the time and opportunity to reject him—he just lost it. He couldn’t handle his rage and lashed out at her.

Had Alley not been apprehended as he had been and had this case come to us as an UNSUB crime, we still would have come up with a profile very similar to the actual killer—a white, blue-collar male in his late twenties to early thirties, without close friends or regular employment, financially dependent on another person, with a history of marital problems and domestic violence, et cetera, et cetera. We would have described the type of pre-offense behavior we expected, as well as post-offense hostility to those close to him, weight loss, substance abuse, absence from work, and preoccupation with the case. He would not feel guilty or contrite that he had taken an innocent life, but would be very much concerned with getting caught. He might have made an excuse for taking a trip out of town. We would have known he was familiar with the base and the surrounding area, which meant he was a local, probably living right on base. Since I would expect him to have no military
service himself or a dishonorable discharge, he would likely be a dependent of base personnel. With all of this, I think we would have gotten him before too long.

And it would be a good thing, too. Because while Sedley Alley wasn’t the standard variety of serial killer, he had no remorse and, in my view, unquestionably would kill again given the right stressors. This was a crime of power and rage and anger and I don’t know any cure for those in their most extreme form.

If he had been an UNSUB and we found him and searched his residence, I would have expected to find pornography and possibly drugs. In fact, when Naval Investigative personnel conducted their authorized search of Alley’s home, they found, among other items, drug paraphernalia and a series of photos of Lynne Alley in pornographic poses with another man. In the storage room under the stairs they also found a twenty-inch-long stick wrapped with tape and bearing an unidentified stain.

In those days, we were not yet able to testify on behavioral subjects; the courts had not yet accepted this. So I sat behind the prosecutors, took notes, and discussed the case with them at the end of every trial day.

Just in case the motive was still obscure to any of the jurors, Williams and Carter buttressed their contention that he was rational with the evidence that air conditioning gauges left at the commanding officer’s house while Alley and others were there in the afternoon to test the compressor over a period of hours were found in Alley’s car. This suggested that perhaps he had killed Suzanne because she had seen him steal them since the house was in the vicinity of the abduction scene. The Collinses actually clung to this explanation for a while since it at least gave them a concrete and easier-to-grasp reason why their daughter had been killed. But frankly, I thought this was a long shot; it didn’t account for the specifics of the crime, and it was never Williams’s main argument. If Alley was simply pissed off that he had been caught in the act and felt he needed to silence his witness, he wouldn’t have punished her as he did. The testimony to this point was harrowing.

On the second day of the trial, Virginia Taylor stated that while she and some friends were at Edmund Orgill Park late
on July 11, 1985, they heard what she characterized as a “death scream,” which seemed to be coming from an area where earlier she had seen an old station wagon headed.

Alley’s tape-recorded statement the afternoon following the murder, in which he asserted that Suzanne’s death was an accident, was played in court. Jurors got to hear him insist, “I did not have sex with her at any time. I want to make that clear right now.” The jurors heard for themselves that he made no mention, nor was there any suggestion, of either Billie or Death.

What struck me as extraordinary about Alley’s confession when I heard it and then read the transcript was the way it all just sort of “happened” in his version. Driving his car in an inebriated state, he just happened to bump into this woman who was jogging. Later, when he had her in his control, he just happened to swing his arm in panic, not even realizing he was holding a screwdriver, which just happened to hit her in the head, penetrate her skull and kill her. (And let’s remember that with all the wounds the medical examiner found on Suzanne’s body, he did not find one consistent with a screwdriver puncture or impact with an automobile.) After Alley says she was dead, he just happened to reach up and touch a tree limb, which gave him the idea to stage the crime to look like a sexual assault by breaking off the limb and shoving it into her vagina. The “death scream” Virginia Taylor heard must have just been the wind or some animal, because according to Alley’s version, Suzanne was already dead at this point. At any rate, the whole thing just sort of magically happens, essentially without Alley’s active participation. It is as if he and Suzanne are just two pawns who happen to be in the same place at the same time when these bad things occur.

Of course, that wasn’t the last word, because Alley also offered his insanity defense, with Battle and Marshall testifying. When you offer an insanity defense, you open up a lot of avenues for the prosecution to dispute the claim. Williams read letters Alley had written to various relatives in which he very rationally discussed his intention to plead that he was temporarily insane and how that would provide a better outcome for him.

In his own mind, Williams classified the Alley treatment
team and other mental health evaluators into the “dreamers” and the “realists.” Leading the realists, he thought, was Deborah Richardson, a psychiatric social worker who was mental health program director at MTMHI. She observed Alley closely for several months and testified that his claims of hallucinations and multiple personalities were inconsistent with what an individual actually suffering these symptoms would experience. More specifically, she noted that his conduct during interviews and evaluations was unrelated to his behavior at other times when he didn’t have to “perform.” According to her testimony, Billie alternated between male and female. She said that Alley, who she stated had an obsession with violent sex, made a habit of associating with the psychotic patients at the hospital to learn how to mimic their behavior. And she also revealed that Alley told staff members of the hospital that he had lied during the confession so his lawyers would be able to show inconsistencies in his story and “get him off.”

Williams brought in Dr. Zillur Athar, a psychiatrist of Asian origin whose intelligence and critical sophistication shone through his sometimes halting English. Athar felt that since Alley wasn’t being very forthcoming with any of his examiners, they were getting frustrated and started leading him in their questioning. Being smart enough to pick up on what was important and what the “right” answers were, Alley started giving them back to them. To test his premise, Athar started baiting Alley himself, asking him, for example, if he ever woke up around, say, 3:00
A.M
. with scary or murderous images. Alley would then tell a subsequent interviewer that he woke up at 2:50 in the morning with terrifying images.

Dr. Samuel Craddock, another member of the treatment team who was a psychologist at MTMHI, had remained on the fence for a long time about the multiple personality diagnosis. But when he got up on the stand, he testified that “at no time in my presence did Mr. Alley show any compassion for the victim.” He thought this didn’t quite square, since Alley had claimed to him that Death was the personality that had killed Suzanne Collins and that Alley himself was “the good guy.”

And when pressed in court, Dr. Battle could not say which
of the personalities had been in control during the murder. Since his theories were perhaps the linchpin of the insanity defense, it began unraveling quickly. Even if Alley were a multiple personality—and again, I stress there was nothing to support that he was—there was no evidence that any personality other than plain old Sedley was in control during the crime and the interrogation. That was the personality that committed the crime, gave the confession, and was standing trial for murder. It seemed pretty clear-cut to me.