Journey into Darkness (47 page)

And the killer was able to escape without notice, which took on greater meaning with the victim’s body temperature measured at ninety-eight degrees, indicating she probably died between midnight and 1:00
A.M.
Perhaps she was found in the closet because the killer was still inside when her husband got home.

Investigators found no fingerprints but did get semen samples from the victim’s vagina, anus, and bedding. There were no stray hairs from the killer. Still awaiting DNA results, police had confirmation from their lab that the style of ligature in this case and Davis’s was virtually identical.

Victimology gave no indication of what made Hellams a target, except that she was a somewhat stocky white woman
with reddish/auburn hair, professionally employed, who lived alone much of the time; her husband was a law student at the University of Maryland who came home only on weekends.

Although the Richmond detectives didn’t think it was related, Horgas asked about the rape in the area. That victim was another single white woman in her thirties who lived in a ground-floor apartment in the South Side. November 1, about 3:00
A.M.
, she awoke to find a black man standing over her with a long knife. The intruder appeared to be in his late twenties, around six feet tall, and wore a ski mask and gloves. A knapsack held rope used to tie her hands. For three hours he raped and sexually tortured her. Around 6:00
A.M.
, as he started tying her ankles, the victim’s sobs got the attention of her neighbors upstairs. He fled when he heard them coming down.

Richmond police did not believe the rapist was the killer they were looking for. This victim was petite, five foot four, and under a hundred pounds, and she was attacked early Sunday morning, not Friday night. The rapist did not tie a noose around her neck, nor did he masturbate on her, and the ropes were not cut by the knife used to cut the rope in the murders. Finally, the task force stood by the original profile and were looking for a white man in his thirties, not a younger black man.

This was the first serial murderer Richmond ever faced and police were trying to learn as they went, taking tips from anyone who’d ever dealt with this kind of animal. The Williamses led a task force which included four extra homicide detectives, an investigator from sex crimes, extra plainclothesmen, even officers from SNAP—the Selected Neighborhood Apprehension Program, formed specifically to fight drugrelated violence, primarily in minority housing areas.

The public, in the meantime, formed huge neighborhood watch groups in areas where previously virtually no one was interested in the program. Town meetings were held with local politicians and police. Advice was given and heeded, as neighbors started trimming bushes around windows and doors, keeping lights on, calling one another when they got home. The situation became volatile as people took it upon themselves to protect their turf: in one instance, a resident
watched two suspicious-looking men in a car that didn’t belong in his neighborhood for an hour before he crept up, put a .45 to the driver’s head, and ordered them out of the car. The men in the car turned out to be undercover cops who were lucky not to have been shot by the vigilant civilian.

Jud Ray and Tom Salp from our unit drove down to Richmond and met with Richmond and Chesterfield County Police in a conference room at the commonwealth attorney’s office. Jud made the point that although statistics and research supported the subject being a white male in his late twenties, they shouldn’t rule out suspects on the basis of race. Given that the killer left no prints or other obvious clues at the scene, Jud profiled an intelligent offender with a prior record of crimes like burglary and sexual assault. And since his victims seemed unable to defend themselves, he must have great upper-body strength.

Jud and Tom also figured the killer had a full-time job, which was why the murders occurred Friday nights. With the type of sexual assault committed, the subject was someone who experienced difficulty with “normal” sex, and likely had difficulty in relationships with women in general. Unlike a lot of violent sexual offenders, he would not be the type to brag about his crime, being much more of a loner.

Quite frankly, the reason we all leaned toward a white offender was that, in addition to the fact that the victims were white, at that point in time we hadn’t seen that kind of unique signature aspect among black, Hispanic, or Asian offenders. There were certain acts we were only seeing among whites, such as sexual penetration with sticks or other objects. That was one of the reasons I’d been so confident we were dealing with a white offender in the Francine Elveson murder in New York, a case I worked on with NYPD in 1979, despite the fact that the medical examiner had found a black pubic hair on the body. She had been assaulted with her own umbrella, and I’d just never seen a black or Hispanic do that to a victim. For the same reason, if Sedley Alley had not been arrested so quickly for the murder of Suzanne Collins and police were looking for an UNSUB, I still would have advised them to concentrate
their efforts on a white male, based on the way he assaulted her.

It was not until later that we first began to start seeing more unique, weird, and involved signatures in sex crimes perpetrated by blacks and other minorities. George Russell, Jr., an intelligent and sophisticated black rapist-murderer in Seattle, placed his victims in elaborate and degrading poses. One had a rifle inserted into her vagina. This was in 1990. It was important to the prosecution’s case to be able to link the murders and prove they were committed by the same individual and I was able to testify on signature, which helped lead to Russell’s conviction.

The reasons for this divergence between white and black offenders are still somewhat speculative, just as are the reasons women don’t become serial killers as men do. Jud’s own theory, based not only on his work in the unit but also on his background as a police officer and growing up in the rural South, is that it has more to do with acculturation than race, per se. “In the interviews we did with rape victims, we just didn’t find either things like oral sex or acts of depravity involving foreign objects from nonwhite offenders the way we did from whites. There is a noticeable difference in the psychopathology of black sexual offenders and white sexual offenders regarding the way they each treat the living or dead body.” Jud believes that while this will continue to be true among black offenders who remain rural, Southern, uneducated, and/or apart from mainstream American society, those black offenders who have become more acculturated into mainstream society will begin imitating the behavior and custom of their white offender counterparts. “Black predator-type offenders are getting more involved with the depravity we’ve previously seen in whites,” he says.

For that reason, while interracial rapes and murders still are less common than intraracial ones, if we saw “white style” depravity or perversion from a black offender, it would more likely be inflicted on a white victim than a black. On the whole, though, this is one of the many areas Jud referred to in the previous chapter that could benefit from further in-depth and high-quality research.

In late November 1987, the killer struck again. Detectives Ernie Hazzard and Bill Showalter of Chesterfield County
outlined the details of the murder there for Horgas and the Richmond task force.

Fifteen-year-old Diane Cho lived with her parents and younger brother in a ground-level, corner apartment in a complex just west of the border between Chesterfield and South Richmond. One Saturday night in late November, the Chos heard their daughter typing a paper around 11:30
P.M.
When they got up to go to work at the family store early the next morning, Diane was still in bed. Around noon, they checked with their son, who said she was still asleep. Although they wondered why she was in bed so late, they knew their son did not want to face his sister’s wrath by being the one to wake her; they left her alone until they arrived home around 3:00. Mrs. Cho found her daughter, dead, in a horrible scene that seemed to police unmistakably like the Richmond murders.

The room itself looked like nothing was amiss: homework papers in their proper place on the desk, no sign of struggle. But on the bed was Diane’s body, nude, her neck and wrists bound. White rope cut deeply into her throat and a heavier rope held her wrists together. The killer had silenced her with a strip of duct tape over her mouth. As with the other victims, there were no wounds or bruising anywhere on her body, except for a fair amount of blood around her pubic region. It was later determined that she was raped so brutally the killer tore a one-inch-diameter hole in her vaginal septum, in addition to tears in her hymen. Both caused bleeding and she was menstruating at the time of the attack. Her fingernails—polished the night before—were perfect, indicating she never had a chance to fight her killer.

In keeping with his pattern, the killer raped her vaginally and anally, leaving some kind of lubricant on the back of her arms and legs. Petechial hemorrhages around her eyes, face, and even shoulders indicated the extent of her torture. There were semen samples in and around the victim, including pure samples on her body and the sheets, indicating he masturbated on her, too.

There were more similarities to the other murders: the killer gained access via her bedroom window, four feet from the ground. Police learned Diane used to remove the screen so she could stick her head out to talk to a friend upstairs.
The killer left no fingerprints or footprints behind and, as usual, the rape-murder took place on a weekend night.

But the killer had branched out into the suburbs, indicating he followed his own press enough to know it would be safer—and more vexing to authorities—to hit new territory. And this time, he struck audaciously when the victim’s family members were asleep in the next room. Detectives figured he either broke in while she was asleep and immediately silenced her with the tape or watched from outside, letting himself in while she showered, taking control immediately when she returned to her room. Detective Showalter observed, “This guy had to be watching her for some time to know when the ideal time to strike was.”

He also left a bizarre calling card of sorts: on the side of her left leg, above her knee, he’d drawn a figure eight in nail polish. The girl’s family had never seen her paint herself, and the polish didn’t match the shade on her nails.

Although they figured they’d find nothing, police searched to rule out any other forces at play in the murder. Diane Cho was into the high school chorus and honor society, though, not drugs or pornography or anything else that would make her a high-risk victim. She was a different race than the other victims, and younger, but in some ways she fit their profile physically: her frame, at five foot three, 140 pounds, was much like theirs.

On November 25, serological results confirmed that the semen from the Cho, Davis, and Hellams crime scenes all matched and the two lead detectives from Chesterfield began reporting directly to the Richmond bureau. At that point, the only common link investigators had been able to establish between the three victims—beyond the general physical profile—was Cloverleaf Mall, where receipts showed Cho and Hellams shopped and Davis worked parttime. The task force theorized the subject picked his victims there, following them home to rape and kill. Police could stake out the mall, but how would they recognize him?

In Arlington, Joe Horgas was more convinced than ever that the Hamm and Tucker murders were linked to those in Richmond, and the rapes in Arlington and Richmond were committed by that same perpetrator: the black masked rapist. He formed a task force to investigate Tucker’s murder.
With his partner, Mike Hill, Horgas was joined by Detective Dick Spaltung from burglary and another detective, Ed Chapman, from the sex crimes unit. Within the context of searching for David Vasquez’s partner or another perpetrator who might have been involved in both Hamm’s and Tucker’s murders—say, the black masked rapist—Horgas had them pull all the burglary and rape files for the area from 1983.

Horgas hand-carried evidence from the Tucker crime scene to the Northern Virginia Bureau of Forensic Science in Fairfax County. By December 22, he had preliminary word back from his contact there, Deanne Dabbs (who conveniently had a good friend in Richmond’s crime lab), that the semen samples from Tucker contained the same blood characteristics as samples from the Davis and Hellams crime scenes. This would help them nail the offender, since only thirteen percent of the population matched these characteristics. Of course, first they had to have a suspect.

He next began reinterviewing victims of the black masked rapist from 1983. Of the nine, eight agreed to talk to him. As difficult as it was to relive their experiences, once they learned the same man could still be out there, now murdering victims, they felt compelled to cooperate.

The first victim was assaulted in June 1983, in a supermarket parking lot. Around 1:00
A.M.
, the petite, dark-haired victim, in her twenties, was approached by a thin black man with a knife. About five foot eight, also in his twenties, he’d pulled a T-shirt in which he’d cut eyeholes over his head, and his hands were covered. He forced the victim to drive him around, then had her stop and get out by a wooded area. Threatening her with the knife the whole time, he forced her to perform oral sex and raped her repeatedly. She escaped when he left her in the woods to go back to the car. This victim did not think her assailant ejaculated and was left with the impression that “he’s capable of anything. And I mean anything.”

The rapist attacked the next three victims in their homes, breaking in as they slept. He matched the same physical description as in the first case, and in each attack he wore gloves and a makeshift mask. The same type of knife was described in each. The pattern of behavior was that he’d
start off demanding money, usually making the victim get her purse, then rape her both orally and vaginally. In all three crimes he threatened the women repeatedly with the knife, issuing warnings like “I’m gonna put my dick in you and you’d better come” and “You’ll have an orgasm or I’ll kill you.” To Horgas, it sounded almost as if the subject was working from a script.