As he opened the door, I saw he had a snub-nosed blue steel revolver. He said, “Put your arms across the back of the front seat,” which we did. I saw the man had an electric light cord in his hands. I told him, “I can’t give you my billfold if you tie my hands. Put that gun away,” and he said, “Don’t worry about that, I’ll get your money,” and he shot and she slumped over.25
Margaret had been shot once in the back of the head, the bullet on impact and leaving wounds that police first thought were the result of two gunshots.
Roy was quick thinking enough to fling open his door, roll out of the car and dash into the bush. He ran through the woods and across a field until he came across a farmhouse and called the police.
Police rushing to the scene later recalled passing a light green car, but by the time they interviewed Roy and got a description of the suspect’s car, it was long gone.
Police found Margaret stripped naked and lying in a pool of blood and brain matter in the front passenger compartment of Roy’s car. She had been raped postmortem in a necrophilic act.
The electric cord that the murderer had attempted to tie Roy with was found at the scene near the car. A description of the suspect was published in all the newspapers the next day: about thirty-five years old, black hair combed straight back, bushy eyebrows, about six feet tall and 170 pounds. A truck driver reported that he helped a man of that description pull a car from a ditch where it had skidded into a tree not far from the crime scene. Police were now looking for a 1947 or 1948 foam green Chrysler sedan with Maryland tags and a dent on the front from hitting the tree.
Cinder Block Shack
Police searched the shack Roy said he passed and where he saw the car parked. The shack was dilapidated and abandoned, but they immediately found lengths of electrical cord like the one found at the crime scene. As the police officers shined their flashlights into the dank cinder block basement, they came upon a bizarre scene. The walls were completely covered with autopsy photographs of women and lurid bondage images cut from true-detective magazines and men’s adventure periodicals.26 In the middle of that, one image stood out: a formal portrait of a young woman that looked like it was cut out of a high school or university yearbook.
With the FBI’s help, the photo was traced to a University of Maryland yearbook and the woman in the picture identified as Wanda Tipton from the graduating class of 1955. The June 1955 double shooting murder of Nancy Marie Shomette and Michael Ann Ryan in the proximity of the university and now this photo in the midst of some pervert’s lair near the site of another woman’s shooting immediately put the police on the trail of Wanda Tipton. Perhaps she knew who the bushy-eyebrowed man might be and why he would have her photo taped next to dozens of images of dead women. It was just too weird for words.
Lovers’ Lane Attacks
Then it got weirder. Another couple stumbled into a police station, the woman barefoot and covered in mud and scratches, and gave a harrowing account of being accosted about six miles from the Margaret Harold murder site. Irwin Howard Adams, twenty-five, and Denise Eggelston, twenty-five, were parked in a wooded picnic area, looking up at the stars and listening to the radio, when another car drove up behind them and stopped with its headlights blinding them. A man got out of the car and slowly walked up on the driver’s side and in a normal voice asked the couple what they were doing there.
Irwin told him that they were listening to the radio.
The man suddenly produced a .38 blue steel snub-nosed revolver and said he would kill them if they did not do what he told them. He ordered them out of the car and made them lie down on the ground and laid out precut lengths of cord. He bound Irwin’s arms behind him. Then he hauled Irwin to his feet and walked him around to the back of the car and attempted to open the trunk. As the man fumbled with the keys, Irwin managed to work his arms loose and tackled him. Denise leapt up and ran away barefoot toward the road. Irwin then broke free from the man and followed Denise. They ran as fast as they could until they couldn’t run any farther. Expecting him to come around the bend in his car any second, they bounded over a guardrail and rolled down a hill into the dark of a swamp and hid there until the next morning.
Finding Wanda Tipton, the college girl in the yearbook picture found in the porn lair of the cinder brick house cellar began to take on urgency. When police finally tracked her down, they were crestfallen when Wanda told them she had no idea why her picture was in the shack or who their suspect could possibly be. And after that police ran out of leads.
But Wanda was not telling the truth. She knew exactly who the man with the bushy eyebrows was. She had dated him. A handsome fellow student at the University of Maryland just out of the Army, a talented jazz musician, poet and philosopher. A gentleman intellectual with a cool cat, bebop nonconformist edge to him. But he was married, and she didn’t want to cause him grief with his wife, so she told the police nothing.
Road Rage
On August 24, 1958, Frank Tuozzo and his wife, June, both thirty-six, were driving on a country road near Laurel, Maryland, at around 10:00 at night. Suddenly they saw the headlights of a car closing in on them from behind, weaving erratically. Eventually, the car overtook them and suddenly skidded to a halt, forcing them to stop. A man leapt out of the car and walked toward them with a handgun in his hand. The Tuozzos just sat there stunned, not knowing what to do.
The man ordered them out of their car and forced them to lie down in the road. After turning off Frank’s car, the man then ordered Frank around to the back of his car, a blue Ford with Washington, DC, tags. Opening his trunk, the man ordered Frank to get in and closed it.
He then forced June into his car and ordered her to slide down to the cramped space on the passenger floor and drove off with Frank in the trunk. Eventually, the man stopped at a dark and secluded area. He ordered June to lift up her dress and take off her underwear. Then he tied her hands to the steering wheel and performed oral sex on her. After a while, he unzipped his pants and ordered her to fellate him. June made a half-hearted effort but then pulled away, refusing to continue, begging him not to kill her because she had two children.
The man suddenly freed her hands and said, “You’re a good woman. You can get out of the car. I’m glad this wasn’t any worse than it was.”
He then climbed out and opened the trunk, letting Frank out. “Get out of here, both of you,” he said. Frank and June took each other’s hands and ran into the dark woods, expecting to be shot down. Instead, they heard the man start his car up and drive away. The description of their assailant matched the descriptions in the previous attacks—but nobody knew that. The previous attacks took place in Anne Arundel County, but this was in Prince George’s County. Might as well have been in another country.
At the core of the serial killer problem always, to this day, is “linkage blindness,” and it was at its most blind on the county level, the level at which states investigate and prosecute crimes. In those days, jurisdictions rarely exchanged information about or were aware of or even much interested in what took place in other counties. There was no pooling of information in which discernible patterns could be identified. And when murders occurred across state lines, they might as well have happened in another universe altogether. This would become a huge problem when the serial killer surge hit in the 1970s and serial killers like Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas and the recently identified super serial killer Samuel Little got into their cars and hit the road, leaving dead women behind like bread crumbs. As we saw in earlier cases, it was mostly newspapers that speculated on “patterns” and “links” and gave monikers to possible multiple murderers or “strings” of related murders. But the abduction of the Tuozzos had been sparsely reported in just a few newspapers, and no connection to the Margaret Harold murder was made or speculated on, let alone the double strangulations of Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable the year before.
What was needed here was an invest
igative agency that worked across state lines: the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the FBI.
Jackson Family Abduction Murders
On Sunday, January 11, 1959, Carroll Vernon Jackson, twenty-nine, his wife, Mildred Jackson, twenty-six, and their two daughters, Susan Ann, five, and infant Janet, eighteen months, disappeared after visiting Mildred’s parents in Buckner, Louisa County, Virginia.
The next morning, Mildred did not answer phone calls from her parents, which was unusual. By Monday afternoon, they were worried enough to drive out to Mildred’s home, ten miles away. They traveled about two miles along Route 609, Buckner Road, before they came upon the Jackson family car sitting askew on the shoulder as if it had been forced off the road. The engine was turned off, keys in the ignition and doors closed. The rearview mirror was flipped upward as if to deflect headlight beams shining from behind. Mildred’s purse with two dollars was in the front, while the back seat was scattered with diapers, dolls and toys, two pillows and a white wool child’s cap among an assortment of other items a family would pack for a short road trip with two children. Volunteer search parties combed the countryside in the vicinity but found nothing.
As news of the mysterious disappearance spread, police received reports from two other people who stated that on the same night a vehicle came up behind them, flashing its high beams, and attempted to run them off the road. In one case their car was overtaken and forced to stop, and a young man with dark hair and bushy eyebrows emerged from his vehicle with a handgun in his hand and started to walk back toward them, but the driver reacted quickly and backed his car away, turned and escaped. Police dismissed the reports as unrelated.
In February, a newspaper article headlined “As if something swooped down in the night . . .” described theories involving witchcraft or UFOs behind the family’s mysterious disappearance.27
On March 4, forty miles away in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near Fredericksburg, farmers James Beach and John W. Scott were salvaging sawdust from the site of a former sawmill. Their truck got stuck in the mud, and as Beach began to gather branches to put under the wheels, he suddenly came face-to-face with a shoe, toe pointed into the ground, heel to the sky. It was a men’s oxford shoe; as his eyes came to a socked ankle protruding from the shoe, he caught a glimpse of gray flesh, in turn protruding from a wool suit trouser leg emerging from beneath the tangled bush and sawdust refuse.
That’s how they found Carroll Jackson.
When police cleared the foliage and branches, Carroll was found facedown on the soft ground, clad in his winter coat and suit, feet spread wide apart, hands bound tightly in front of him with his red tie.28 His face and the top of his head were covered in lacerations from an apparent beating. He had been shot once; the large-caliber bullet entered his left temple at the eyebrow line and emerged above the right eyebrow.29 Nearby, police would find Carroll’s smashed eyeglasses and plastic grips from a .38 handgun, which must have broken off when the murderer beat Carroll about the face and head before shooting him. One of the grips had a hair adhered to it, but in pre-DNA days of forensics, it could not be conclusively matched to any of the Jacksons.
Before Jackson’s body was raised and removed from the scene, an Associated Press photographer had farmer James Beach and Spotsylvania sheriff B. W. Davis Jr. squat down next to the corpse and look down at it pensively. He snapped a photo (which was duly splashed across front pages the next day).30 Then they lifted Jackson’s body.
That’s how they found eighteen-month-old Janet.
The baby was also lying facedown but had no wounds or signs of blunt trauma. It was theorized that the child had been in Carroll’s bound hands and he fell on her when he was shot. The coroner would later elaborate that with the head wound Carroll sustained, he might have lived for another three or four hours, his infant daughter squirming beneath him until she died from either suffocation or exposure.
The area around the site was intensively searched for the rest of the family, Mildred and her five-year-old daughter, Susan. After a day, it became sickeningly evident that the murderer had taken the mother and girl away for his own twisted purposes. A lot of cops that day must have prayed that when the two were found, it wouldn’t be on their turf. The ones in Virginia got prayers answered.
On March 21, fourteen-year-old John Bolin and his friend John Paddy were hunting small game with their air rifle BB guns in the Mount Tabor region in Maryland. They were about a half mile away from where Margaret Harold had been murdered in 1957 and fifty feet away from an abandoned shack. (It’s a subject of controversy whether this shack was the same one in which the bondage photos had been found taped to its basement walls following the Harold murder.)
The boys spotted a flash of what looked like a small squirrel or rat and fired their BB guns at it. It didn’t move. As they approached, they began to make out what looked like golden strands of fur or hair. They had either shot the animal dead or it was a rat’s nest. Bolin cautiously poked it with the barrel of his air gun, and when he pulled it back, the hair tangled around the front sight and came up with the barrel along with the head of a small girl. Two years later at trial, Bolin would testify, “I first thought it was a baby doll, then I saw it was a human.”
Susan Jackson had been found.
When police dug the child out of the shallow grave, they found Mildred Jackson’s body beneath her daughter’s, lying on her back, her face badly beaten and with one of her stockings tied tightly around her neck. Her dress was pulled up over her head, but otherwise she was fully dressed except for her shoes, which were not found.
In the nearby shack, police found a red button torn from Mildred’s coat. The Sex Beast, as he became known, had taken Mildred into the shack to do what he did to her. According to a later trial motion:
Defendant took Mrs. Jackson into the house, where a button off her coat was later found. There or nearby he beat her brutally about the right side of her face and head, probably with his left fist (he is left handed), and forced her to her knees so hard that her knees were bruised. His purpose was to perform an abnormal sexual act on her and to try to persuade or force her to perform an abnormal sexual act on him. The injuries about her head were so severe that she died of aspiration of blood into the lungs. A stocking had been tied around her neck so tight that it cut into her flesh, and it may also have been used to gag her. Most of the blood was aspirated while she was lying on her back either in or near the grave which defendant dug for her and Susan in the sandy soil. Susan had died from the effects of a very severe blow on the back of her head.31
The killer had probably tied the stocking around Mildred’s neck to lead her around as if on a leash.
The FBI and the Capture of the Sex Beast
The discovery of Mildred and Susan Jackson brought the FBI into the case, perhaps for the first time in a sexual serial murder investigation. Since the 1980s, the FBI and its “mindhunters” at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC)’s Behavioral Analysis Unit 4 have been regarded as the nation’s “clearinghouse” on serial killers. Soon we will see how this was not only a product of the serial killer epidemic, but actually shaped the very notion of a serial killer epidemic.
If we set aside the serial murders committed by bank-robbing “public enemies” that the FBI pursued across state lines in the 1930s, the FBI had never, until the Sex Beast case, been involved in the investigation of serial murders beyond offering their laboratories to local police for evidence analysis. Former profiler Robert Ressler writes that when he began first focusing on serial killer behavioral patterns in the 1970s, “the FBI was almost completely uninterested in murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other criminals who prey on their fellowmen. Most of these violent-behavior cases fell entirely within the jurisdiction of local law-enforcement agencies and were not violations of the federal laws that the FBI was charged with enforcing.”32
But when Mildred and Susan
Jackson were taken across the state line from Virginia and murdered in Maryland, this brought the FBI into a sexual serial murder case for the first time in its history. Following the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932, Congress had passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) (known as the Lindbergh Law) making it a federal crime to abduct and take a victim across state lines. As such, the abduction of Mildred and Susan fell into the jurisdiction of the FBI to investigate, although not that of her husband, Carroll, and daughter Janet, nor the murders of the four victims—those crimes remained local counties to investigate and prosecute.
The FBI, unfortunately, was no better at apprehending the murderer of the Jackson family than were the various Virginia and Maryland county sheriff’s investigators. Yet on June 24, 1960, after two and half years of no apparent leads or progress, the FBI suddenly announced an arrest in the Margaret Harold murder.
Once again, the FBI had gotten involved on a technicality. The suspect had been arrested in West Memphis, Arkansas, on the charge of “unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution”—a federal crime within the jurisdiction of the FBI to investigate and enforce. The prosecution he was accused of fleeing was the case of Margaret Harold. The Jackson family murders were not mentioned at first.
The exact chain of events leading to the identification and arrest of Sex Beast serial killer Melvin Rees Jr. remains somewhat murky and convoluted to this day, as does his childhood history and biography.
After the bodies of the Jacksons had been found, the governor of Virginia and police in Virginia and Maryland received letters naming jazz musician Melvin Rees, a divorced father with a four-year-old son, as someone who should be investigated in the Jackson murders. When police appeared to fail to act on the information, the letter writer now personally went into the FBI office in Norfolk and introduced himself as Glenn Leroy Moser, a childhood friend of Rees and a graduate of the University of Maryland in criminology.
American Serial Killers Page 18