Journey into Darkness (49 page)

“Generally speaking, a guy will kill right there where he’s been killing until he’s flushed out or something else happens,” said Jud.

“If he’d been arrested in a rape or related sex crime, he
would have surfaced for consideration in all of these—and he didn’t,” Steve concluded.

Likewise, if he left the area and began working somewhere else, some other law enforcement agency would have picked up on his pattern and responded to Horgas’s published inquiry. And that didn’t happen, either. But if the activity ceases, as it suddenly seemed to here, then the chances were good that he’d been incarcerated on some unrelated charge. The only other strong possibility was that he had died, and they could effectively rule that one out since the same offender was apparently now back at work again.

“He was probably arrested as a burglar,” Steve stated. “His other profession.”

“Look,” said Jud, “since you didn’t surface a sexual assailant back in the early 1980s but his activity stopped shortly after the homicide of Carolyn Hamm, go back and look for someone arrested for burglary in the environment where the first rape occurred.”

A burglary conviction ought to be good for about a threeor four-year sentence, Steve reasoned. The timing worked out. “So if you can identify a subject charged with burglary in northern Virginia, incarcerated for about three years, and then is in some kind of work release down in Richmond, that would be a very high-priority suspect.”

Horgas followed the agents’ advice. He went back to the first rape—disconcerting in part because if the killer lived in that neighborhood, he didn’t live very far from where Horgas lived with his wife and young son, whom he left home alone at all hours because of his job—then pulled the files and reviewed all incidents of individuals arrested for burglary within the appropriate time frame.

In Richmond, where the citizens were in full-blown hysterical alert, the detectives weren’t buying his theory—even after he presented them with the same information he showed the FBI agents and even though dark, possibly Negroid hairs were found with several victims.

Immediately after New Year’s 1988, Horgas and Hill started reviewing piles of data printed out from the department’s computer. They targeted offenders arrested in Arlington in 1984 and released three years later in Richmond. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to narrow their search parameters
as well as they would have liked: parole records listed offenders from many jurisdictions and they weren’t sorted according to the parolee’s residence. There was also no indication of the offenders’ crimes or when they were incarcerated. So it became a formidable, mostly manual task.

After spending days at this, Horgas refocused. He’d worked the section of Arlington where the first rape occurred and knew a lot of the people there. He tried to remember anyone who would have been the right age to match the description of the rapist. As Paul Mones describes in
Stalking Justice
, his excellent book on the case, the detective drove the streets to jog his memory and finally came up with a first name: Timmy.

Timmy was a local teenager known as a neighborhood troublemaker in the area around the first rape about ten years earlier. Horgas had investigated him then in connection with a burglary, although he was not arrested for that crime. Back then, Timmy had a reputation for having set fire to something—his mother’s house or maybe her car, Horgas couldn’t recall—which reminded him of how the rapist set fire to the car of one of his victims. Horgas asked around for two days, but no one else in the department remembered this kid. Then, on January 6, 1988, Joe Horgas remembered the teenager’s full name: Timothy Spencer.

A couple of computer checks later, Horgas found what he was looking for: Timothy Spencer—a black male just the right age to be the masked rapist—had a history of burglary arrests dating back to 1980, including a conviction in Alexandria, a neighboring jurisdiction to Arlington, on January 29, 1984. Review of his prison history showed he’d been released to a halfway house in Richmond—Hospitality House—on September 4, 1987.

Details of his last conviction were frightening in the context of the crimes for which Horgas and Hill were considering him: he entered the home through a small back window and was arrested with commemorative coins in his pockets, stolen from several homes, along with a pair of dark socks, a small flashlight, and a screwdriver. A five-inch folding knife was found in his car. Several of the masked rapist’s victims reported that he wore socks over his hands, that he had a flashlight and pulled a folding knife on them. But the
commemorative coins were the clincher. The collectible coins belonging to the Tuckers, though potentially valuable to a burglar, were not taken during that break-in. He’d been sent away once for stealing easily identified coins, and he wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake twice. As we’d predicted, he learned from his earlier crime.

According to records, Spencer’s permanent address in Arlington was just 200 yards from where the first rape occurred. The halfway house in Richmond was located within walking distance of both the Hellams and Davis homes.

Horgas contacted the halfway house to compare dates of the 1987 attacks with days and times Spencer signed out. None of the test dates ruled him out. Horgas also learned that if Spencer was their man, another part of our theory was correct: he had a day job at a furniture factory during the week.

Horgas tried calling Richmond, but couldn’t reach the Williams boys, who were out on the scene of another murder. Initially, it looked like the “South Side Strangler’s” work except this victim had been beaten viciously about the head. But later that day, Richmond police responded to a suicide call and found the body of a man who’d dated the murder victim’s sister and rented a room from her until she threw him out. It became apparent that the latest murder was the first copycat of the Strangler.

Tension was high January 7, when Horgas and Hill met with the detectives from Richmond. They agreed to surveillance of Spencer, but were still going with the view that their killer was white. But Spencer had put in for another furlough to Arlington that coming weekend and no one wanted to take any chances. In the end, though, his trip to Arlington was canceled by a snowstorm.

There was a setback that Friday when Richmond authorities stopped Spencer outside Cloverleaf Mall, where he was waiting in a car for two women who were observed shoplifting. Although fearful the heat would cause Spencer to leave the area, Arlington police took the incident as proof that he hung out at the mall, where the task force theorized the killer found his victims.

After more than a week of surveillance, Richmond police decided Spencer was doing nothing suspicious, certainly not
acting like a serial killer. They announced they were calling off surveillance Monday the eighteenth. With that, Arlington County Commonwealth Attorney Helen Fahey made the decision to go before a grand jury. They went to court Wednesday the twentieth and got an indictment. The arrest warrant was issued and signed that day.

In anticipation of the arrest, Horgas contacted Quantico for interview tips. Steve advised him to be patient and let Spencer do the talking. In his arrest for burglary in January of 1984 he was willing to cooperate with police because he was so glad they knew nothing of his other crimes. Serial killers very rarely confess, Steve warned, but said if Horgas could get him to open up it would be by talking about burglary and not the rapes and murders.

After the grand jury handed down the indictment, on their way to Richmond, Horgas and Hill stopped at Spencer’s residence in Arlington. He lived in half of a two-family brick house with his mother and half-brother. His grandmother lived on the other side. Located at the end of a quiet culde-sac, near the site of the first rape, the house was within ten minutes’ walk of the Tuckers’ house.

The detectives explained to Spencer’s mother that they were investigating a burglary that took place over Thanksgiving. They told her someone had seen her son in the area and they wanted to check her house for stolen goods. Although they had no warrant, she understood that her cooperation could help exclude her son as a suspect if they found nothing, so she gave them permission to look around.

After a quick search, all they had was a roll of duct tape, not a match to tape used in Cho’s murder.

Next, they went to Richmond with tactical squad Sergeant Henry Trumble and another detective, Steve Carter. They arrested Timothy Spencer on burglary charges that evening when he returned to Hospitality House from work. He questioned police, wondering why so many cops were involved in his arrest and why the bond was set so high—$350,000—if he was only wanted for burglary. He gave permission for officers to search his room, which yielded nothing specific, although he did have several screwdrivers and a cap and gloves, whose possession was not that unusual in the middle of winter. But on the bottom side of his mattress someone
had drawn the infinity symbol—a sideways number eight—like the one drawn on Cho’s leg.

The suspect was talkative and friendly during the drive back to Arlington. When Horgas asked if he would mind providing a blood sample, though, Spencer asked if it was in connection with a rape. Horgas said it was just to check against a burglary; sometimes a burglar cuts himself breaking in. But as Paul Mones reported, Spencer answered, “No ... if you want my blood, it’s got to have something to do with a rape because I didn’t cut myself going in no house. I didn’t cut myself on no fucking broken window.”

When he learned where the burglary took place, Spencer specifically asked if it had anything to do with the murder he read about in the papers, but Horgas kept playing it cool, per his FBI tips. After hours of interrogation by Horgas and other detectives from Arlington and Richmond over a period of several days, Spencer still had not confessed, nor did he ever. He did, however, give a blood sample that was to prove as telling as anything he might have said.

Initial lab results showed that Timothy Spencer’s blood was consistent with semen stains on Susan Tucker’s nightgown, a match that would only fit thirteen percent of the population. Further, his hair had characteristics matching samples from Tucker’s body and sink. But this wasn’t enough; they’d need DNA to convict.

We began looking into Spencer’s background for hints of what he would become. His parents, both of whom attended some college, divorced when he was seven, after ten years of marriage. His father, a postal employee, reportedly had no contact with the boy after the divorce. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, eventually becoming engaged to a college graduate who had steady work as a bricklayer. Spencer and his mother both stated that family life was good.

But Timmy was always in trouble. At nine, he set a fire in the boys’ bathroom and urinated and defecated in various places throughout his school, causing officials to note his anger and hostility and his need to “prove that he is the one in charge of the situation and not the environment,” eerily portending future attempts to dominate, show control. He was arrested for larceny at nine and eleven, and by fourteen he’d moved into breaking and entering. In school, he
consistently performed below his grade level and was left back after the eighth grade. He did not fit in with his classmates, but resented being forced to study in remedial classes. This was all pretty consistent with backgrounds we’d seen during our interviews with serial offenders. By contrast, his brother, Travis, was a good student and outstanding basketball player at the time.

At fifteen, Timmy had trouble with a hit-and-run and joyriding and was sent to a juvenile facility, dropping out of school for good in tenth grade. By the tune he was nineteen he’d been arrested for possession of a concealed weapon, breaking and entering, and probation violation. Throughout the early 1980s he was either serving time for burglary, trespassing, and violation of probation, or living with his grandmother. She felt he made a real effort to change, getting involved in the church and studying for his GED, or high school equivalency diploma.

He had trouble keeping a job, not because he would be fired, but because he would leave after a period of months and move on to another. His work was typically menial: as a janitor or bricklayer. He admitted to regular use of alcohol and marijuana but said he didn’t have a problem with either substance.

A psychologist who studied Spencer in 1983 while he was serving time for burglary and trespassing reported he was “mentally intact, not suffering from delusions or hallucinations,” but had difficulty following rules. According to the report, he “tends to set his own limits as compared to following those set by others.” The psychologist tested his IQ at 89, obviously much lower than Spencer’s capabilities.

After his arrest in January 1984, when he was caught redhanded with stolen coins, he still denied his guilt. A presentencing report noted he “rationalizes his behavior and blames others for his involvement in the instant offenses.”

And he was a good actor. Even as they were interviewing him, at times investigators found him likable. Like a lot of these guys, except when he lost his temper, it was hard to remember what he was capable of doing. That’s why I also stress how important it is to come into these interviews wellprepared and completely familiar with the details of the crimes. Employers characterized him as a friendly loner. His
girlfriend, who’d been dating him since the previous October and reportedly saw him every weekend, described him the same way. She denied anything unusual about their sex life—no masks or devices—and did not believe her boyfriend could be a killer. That, of course, was not unusual, either.

Only one ex-girlfriend had anything of potential interest to report. A prostitute, she said Spencer once advised her she could use Vaseline if she ever had trouble with vaginal dryness and admitted to her he enjoyed masturbating, despite his assertion to Joe Horgas that he had “never jacked off,” when Horgas confronted him with the fact that semen had been found on and around the bodies. Investigators were never able to establish a relationship between Spencer and any of his victims, although two witnesses could place him on a local bus that went to Cloverleaf Mall. The key to the case was the scientific evidence.