Journey into Darkness (6 page)

The one exception to this generality, the one place we do occasionally see women involved in multiple murders, is in a hospital or nursing home situation. A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife. It does happen with something “clean” like drugs. These often fall into the category of either “mercy homicide,” in which the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering, or the “hero homicide,” in which the death is the unintentional result of causing the victim distress so he can be revived by the offender, who is then declared a hero. And, of course, we’ve all been horrified by the cases of mothers, such as the highly publicized Susan Smith case in South Carolina, killing their own children. There is generally a particular set of motivations for this most unnatural of all crimes, which we’ll get into later on. But for the most part, the profile of the serial killer or repeat violent offender begins with “male.” Without that
designation, my colleagues and I would all be happily out of a job.

Until that happens—which, if the last several thousand years of human history are any indication, won’t be anytime in the foreseeable future—some of us are going to have to continue making that journey into darkness: into the dark mind of the killer and the dark fate of his victim.

That’s the story I want to tell here.

I’ve often said that what we do in analyzing a murder, that what any good homicide detective does, is very similar to what a good actor does in preparing for a role. We both come to a scene—in the actor’s case a scene in a play or movie script, in ours, a murder scene—we look at what’s there on the surface—written dialogue between the characters or evidence of a violent crime—and we try to figure out what that tells us. In other words, what really happened between the principal characters in this scene? Actors call this “subtext,” and what they’ll tell you they need to know for themselves before they can act a scene is: What does the character want? Why does he say this particular thing or take this particular action?

What is the motive?

Motive is one of the thorniest issues in criminal investigative analysis. It is also among the most critical. Until you can figure out why a particular violent crime was committed, it is going to be very difficult trying to come to meaningful conclusions regarding the behavior and personality of the UNSUB. Even if you do catch him, it can still be very problematic prosecuting him successfully. That was the problem Hank Williams faced going into the Sedley Alley trial, and that was why he called me in. In the case of bank robbery, the motive—like its related element, the signature—is obvious: the offender wants the money and he doesn’t want to work for it legitimately. But let’s say you’re investigating a
breaking and entering in which the resident of the apartment was raped and killed. Was the primary motive burglary, sexual assault, or murder? Either way, the victim is still dead, but it makes a big difference to us in figuring out what kind of person the killer is.

During the fall of 1982, we got a call from a police department in the Midwest investigating the rape-murder of a twenty-five-year-old woman. The crime occurred in the living room of the apartment she and her husband had lived in for about six months. When the husband returned home, he found the place had been completely ransacked, leading police to wonder whether the primary motive had actually been burglary and the rape and murder a secondary crime of opportunity.

The crime scene photos were very complete and welldone. The victim was found face-up on the living room floor, with her dress up around her waist and panties pulled down to her knees. Despite the disarray in the room, there was no evidence of struggle and no defense wounds on the body. The murder weapon was a hammer belonging to the victim and her husband. It was found in the kitchen sink, where it appeared the UNSUB had placed it to wash off the blood. The husband reported that some of his wife’s jewelry had been taken.

In interesting contrast to the appearance of the crime scene, the ME’s report found no apparent evidence of sexual assault and no traces of semen on the victim or her clothing. However, tox screens did show that she had been drinking shortly before the attack. This was where I said, “Bingo!” The crime was staged to look like what an inexperienced person thinks a rape-murder is supposed to look like.

I told the surprised detective I was pretty sure he’d already interviewed the killer, and that the motive wasn’t burglary. It wasn’t even sexual aggression.

This is what I visualized having happened:

The victim and the offender had been drinking together in her apartment. They got into an argument, probably a rehash and continuation of one they’d had many times in the past. The tension reached a threshold that the offender could no longer stand. He grabbed the closest weapon of opportunity, which happened to be the hammer in the
kitchen, returned and angrily struck the victim several times on her head and face until she collapsed. Realizing he would be the obvious suspect, the offender rushed to the kitchen sink to wash blood from his hands and bloody fingerprints from the handle of the hammer. He then went back to the dead victim and rolled her over into a face-up position, lifted her dress and pulled down her underpants to stage a sexually motivated assault. He then ransacked the drawers to make it appear that the intruder had come in searching for money or valuables.

At this point in my narrative the detective said, “You just told me the husband did it.”

I coached him on how to reinterview the husband. During the polygraph, I said, the key thing would be to stress that the police knew he got blood on his hands and tried—unsuccessfully—to wash the bloody evidence away.

Within a few days the husband was polygraphed, failed the test, and then admitted his guilt to the polygraph examiner.

Sometimes you’re faced with a case in which the motive should be apparent, but something doesn’t quite add up. That’s what happened early in the afternoon of January 27, 1981, in Rockford, Illinois.

About 1:00
P.M.
someone walked in to Fredd’s Groceries and shot and killed the fifty-four-year-old owner, Willie Fredd, and an employee, Fredd’s twenty-year-old nephew, Albert Pearson. There were no witnesses.

Fredd was found face-down on the floor behind the counter. Detectives determined that he must have been sitting behind the counter when he was shot twice with .38 caliber slugs—one in his neck, the other in his spleen. The younger victim was found halfway out the swinging doors to the outside. He’d been shot three times in the chest by the same weapon, evidently while backing away from his assailant. Strangely, there was no evidence of anything of value being taken from the store. Fredd and Pearson, it should be noted, were black.

Around 8:45 the following morning, a man coming in for gas at a Clark Oil Company Super 100 service station in Rockford came upon the body of the attendant in the station’s
supply storage room. The victim was an eighteen-year-old white male identified as Kevin Kaiser. He was propped against the wall where he’d fallen after being shot five times with a .38 caliber weapon, though ballistics tests later showed it was not the same weapon that had killed the two men at the grocery store the previous day. Four of the bullets had passed through his chest. The fifth entered the right side of his face and exited the left side of his neck, clearly shot at close range. The lack of bleeding at either the entry or exit wound meant the heart had already stopped; the young victim was dead before this last shot was fired.

As far as victimology, people who knew Kevin had nothing but good things to say about him, describing him as hardworking and “a real nice kid.” And like the incident the day before, nothing of value appeared to have been taken. There was a description of a possible suspect in the area, however: a black male in his late twenties, medium height with short hair and a mustache.

Shortly after 7:00 the next morning, a husband and wife who’d pulled in at the E-Z Go gas station in Rockford found the attendant lying face-up in a large pool of blood in that station’s storage room. They’d gone in to try to find someone when the station appeared to be unattended during business hours. The victim this time was Kenny Foust, a thirty-five-year-old white male who had been shot twice one bullet entering the left side of his face and passing into his brain, the other after he collapsed to the floor, from the right side of his neck to the left. The customers immediately called the rescue squad, which arrived while Foust was still alive, but he died shortly after arriving at Rockford Memorial Hospital without regaining consciousness. It appeared that about $150 was robbed from the station. There were no witnesses, but ballistics tests indicated that the gun that had killed Kenny Foust had also killed Willie Fredd and Albert Pearson—the first real link in any of these three incidents. Rockford police immediately formed a major case task force.

Four days later, on the afternoon of February 2, someone came into a Radio Shack store in Beloit, Wisconsin, and shot and killed both the twenty-one-year-old manager, Richard Boeck, and a twenty-six-year-old male customer, Donald
Rains. Another customer later found them lying next to each other on the floor near the rear of the store. Both had been shot multiple times in the head and chest even though detectives saw no sign of a struggle with the gunman. It seemed that some money had been taken from the store, but they couldn’t tell how much. Beloit is just over Wisconsin’s southern border, about twenty miles or so north of Rockford.

There were three witness accounts of men seen in the area prior to the killings. One of those was of a black male similar in description to the one spotted in connection with the second shooting in Rockford. The witness accounts and similarity of circumstances suggested this last crime could be related to one or more of the previous three. That gave it an interstate character and meant the FBI could be called in. I got involved right after this when I got a frantic call from the FBI in Illinois.

The problem was, the case didn’t add up. There were multiple weapons. The victims were both black and white, a wide variety of ages, and almost nothing of value had been taken in crimes that looked like nothing else but armed robberies. Who was he and why was he doing it?

As I looked at the police reports, the crime scene photographs, and the autopsy protocols, this started looking less like a string of armed robberies gone bad and more like a certain type of serial murder. I still didn’t really understand what the motive was, but the style of killing was consistent and I would characterize it as an assassination style. None of the victims appeared to have put up any resistance and most were shot more times and more viciously than was necessary to achieve the purpose of neutralizing them for a robbery. That is to say, the killing went far beyond modus operandi.

The killings were methodical and sequential, but didn’t make much sense. You could even think of them as spree murders rather than serial crimes. Nothing of significant value was taken. There was no sexual component to the murders. There was no evidence the UNSUB knew any of the victims, so an attempt at personal revenge didn’t seem likely. Quite the contrary, the victims didn’t seem to have anything in common with each other.

When you’ve analyzed what should be the motive based
on the crime scenario and that doesn’t make sense, and you go through all the other “logical” ones and you can’t make one of them fit reasonably, then you start looking into psychiatric territory. All crimes have a motive, all crimes make sense according to some logic, though that logic may be a strictly internal one with no relationship to any “objective” logic.

This made me think our UNSUB was probably a paranoid individual, delusional but still functional. I thought the multiple weapons spoke to this, too. He only used one type of ammunition; he was familiar with the .38 slug and trusted it. But he had more than one gun. I was willing to bet there were more still. When you’re paranoid you can never have too many guns.

To commit this series, he had to be able to get from point A to point B, which meant he had to be able to drive, which meant he probably had a driver’s license, which meant he was operating in the everyday world at some level and he had some job, even if it was a menial one. He would have interaction with people around him, but they would know he was “odd.”

In any series of crimes that takes place over some distance, we concentrate on the first case, which for our purposes is usually the most significant. In multiple homicides the killer is usually of the same race as his victim. Assuming that the four cases were related, here we had a situation in which the first two victims were black and all the other subsequent ones were white. A killer begins where he feels the highest comfort level. For that reason, I believed the UNSUB was black, and therefore possibly matched the description of the two separate witnesses. For that same reason, I also felt he was likely to live within a relatively close distance of Fredd’s Groceries. He would have had some excuse to be in that area.

From our data, paranoid personalities as well as paranoid schizophrenics typically surface in their mid-twenties. Assassin types also seem to surface around their mid-twenties, so I felt pretty secure pegging this guy in his mid- to late twenties.

I expected this type of individual to feel more comfortable at night and in the darkness. The first crime—the one I
presumed to be close to home—was committed in the afternoon. But the next two were done late at night or in the early morning hours. It took until the fourth crime for him to be bold enough to go out again in broad daylight. For the same reason, I thought he’d drive a dark-colored car and favor dark clothing. He’d also feel the need of a large “power dog” for protection, either a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher; he might even have two. If I were constructing the same profile today, I’d probably specify a pit bull, the current vogue. But back then, it would be either a shepherd or a Doberman. Along with the police-type dog, he might use a police radio scanner.