The Profiler

by Pat Brown

  That’s when he raped her.

  She was terrified that he was going to hurt her, so she did not fight back. May was a big guy, and she was a little girl.

  He cleverly used a condom so he wouldn’t leave any evidence, and after he finished raping her, he told her to put her clothes back on, and she did. She looked sad, and she was.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “I’m tired, I just want to go to sleep,” she said.

  She was emotionally shutting down from the horrible assault.

  He said, “You want to go to sleep? No problem,” and May put his arm around her neck in a sleeper hold, tightened his arm, and he strangled her.

  When she was unconscious and wasn’t moving anymore, he picked up her body and put it in a closet in the empty building, closed the door, and walked away.

  It turned out there was never any temporary work at the building that day; that was just a ruse he used to get her there, and after he got what he wanted, he went on his way.

  The mistake Scotty May made—besides the crimes of raping and strangling an underage girl—was that he didn’t check to see how dead she was, because she was still alive. She woke up, and she got out of the closet, ran down through the building, and went to the office and told them to call the police because she had been raped and strangled.

  The police came, took her in, and asked her to write down exactly what had happened to her. She wrote, “Scotty May took me to this building, and he raped me, and he strangled me.” She wrote it all down, and the police went looking for May.

  A year after Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, Scotty May was drinking tea in his living room when he saw a police car pull up. He thought they were coming to talk to him about a fraud he committed at work, but they were actually there to ask him about the thirteen-year-old girl that they believed he raped and strangled earlier that day.

  “Oh, did you hear about the fraud?” he asked.

  Until then, no, they didn’t know he had been ripping off the company where he worked.

  “No, no,” the officers said. “We’re not here about a fraud. We’re looking into the case of this thirteen-year-old girl that’s gone missing. Shania.”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know her. I don’t know where she is. This morning she wanted to go back to the motel on Route 1 where her boyfriend was, so I dropped her off and haven’t seen her since.”

  “Well, Scotty, she said that you raped her,” and with that the detective pushed the girl’s report in front of him. “See what she’s written about you?”

  “That’s impossible. She couldn’t have written that,” he said.

  “Why not?” the officer asked.

  “She’s dead.”

  Swift move, May. Gotta love stupid criminals. May wasn’t as slick as he thought. They arrested him, obviously, because he screwed that one up, making the criminally stupid mistake of saying she was dead before he was supposed to know she was dead.

  THE SCOTTY MAY story could have ended there. But he decided he was bright enough that he should be his own lawyer.

  To be honest, he presented himself quite well in court. On the day Scotty’s trial began, Art looked around to see if he could spot him.

  “Where is he?” Art asked the bailiff.

  May was dressed so well that Art thought he was looking at a lawyer.

  “No,” the bailiff said, “that is Scotty May.”

  Some people can present themselves quite well in court when they dress up, so May was in a nice suit, and he thought this was enough to ensure a successful trial. He was well spoken, talkative, gentle, and respectful in his approach to the jurors. Mind you, he had spent most of his adult life in prison for committing one crime after another. He’d hardly been on the outside, but he saw himself as a pretty fine jailhouse lawyer.

  Shania started crying as soon as she saw May in court. He got her on the stand, looked her in the eye, and he said to her, “You know I didn’t rape you, don’t you?”

  She stared right back at him and said, “Yes you did, Scotty, yes you did.”

  All he could say to that was “Oh,” which the jury didn’t consider much of a defense. Maybe he thought he could intimidate Shania, but it didn’t work.

  He was found guilty of kidnapping, guilty of rape, and guilty of attempted murder.

  Even though he looked good, he wasn’t a very good lawyer. But May continued representing himself in the penalty phase. He expected to convince the jury that he was a decent guy in spite of the fact that he kidnapped, raped, and attempted to murder a thirteen-year-old girl.

  What no one expected was that Scotty May was a changed man.

  “I found the Lord. Yes, I found Jesus,” May proclaimed. “I’ve been reading my Bible, I’m a Christian now, and I just want to tell you that I think you ought to give me a chance, because I’m not really that bad a guy.

  “As a matter of fact, I did Shania a favor, because when I met Shania, she was a runaway. She was living with a man who was dealing drugs. She was on the streets. She wasn’t in school, and after I did this to her, she returned home to her family, and she’s back in school. I should get a break because I helped her out!”

  That’s a sign of a true psychopath, making lemonade out of lemons: “I did kidnap, rape, and strangle that girl, tried to kill her, but I did her a favor. So I think we should call it even.”

  Scotty May’s closing argument won him a sentence of life plus thirty. He received twenty years for abduction with intent to defile, to be served concurrently; the remaining life plus ten years are to be served consecutively. May can still apply for geriatric parole when he reaches the age of sixty, which will be in the year 2028.

  The court declined to hear oral arguments on the motion to set aside the jury verdict on rape. But Judge Stanley P. Klein did tell May: “Your whole defense is that you weren’t there. But it was clear to this Court, based on the questions you asked the witness [Shania] on cross-examination, that you WERE there. In this Court’s opinion, the jury did not make a mistake.”

  ART SPOKE TO a detective and told him he attended Scotty May’s trial.

  The detective said, “We were supposed to have somebody there, but I don’t know if we did.” It was the first official acknowledgment that the police were even considering Scotty May a person of interest. “We are certainly focused on him,” the detective said, halfheartedly.

  Later still, Art received the following phone message from the detective in charge of the case:

  “Hello, Art. This is Detective B. from the police department. I had told you that I would get back with you sometime in October, and I wanted to chat with you briefly about the case. I have no new exciting news for you, except that the prosecutor and I are working toward an indictment. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a time frame as yet. But I would like to talk to you. Please call me later today, or I will try you again. Thank you.”

  The phone call gave Art false hope that they were doing something, but nothing ever came of the indictment.

  IT WAS ABOUT a year after the Mary Beth Townsend murder that Scotty May attacked the thirteen-year-old girl.

  When I found out the name of the Trashman employee was Scotty May, I paid a visit to his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, to discover a little bit more of what she knew around the time of the crime. The day Mary Beth died was, not coincidentally, Crystal Jones’s birthday. I believe May needed money to buy his girlfriend a present.

  The day after the murder, May went to Philadelphia. Mary Beth’s murderer stole her rings, and he would have had to hawk them someplace; they were worth some money. If you hawk things in Washington, D.C., you have to show a driver’s license—same for Virginia—so your name will be recorded as the person selling the item. But in Philadelphia, the rules are different and it’s a popular place to fence stolen goods. I figured the murderer might go there, because he wouldn’t be asked for an ID. I never did find a
pawn shop that could identify May, but according to police reports he sure acted peculiar while he was there. He arrived at his estranged wife’s home, beat her, threatened to kill her, pulled out a gun, and, after fleeing, was chased by police to the rooftop of a nearby building. The criminal justice system didn’t put him back in prison, so he moved on to raping and trying to kill Shania.

  THERE WAS AN incredible amount of evidence linking Scotty May to the murder of Mary Beth Townsend, so Art and I returned once more to the police department. They still refused to look at any of the new information I brought.

  Police departments are as susceptible as any business to the egos of the people who are involved and all the inherent politics. They fall prey to all kinds of issues that can be radically different from one police department to the next and from one investigator to the next.

  You throw the dice when you talk about employees of any business, and, unfortunately, Mary Beth Townsend’s murder drew a pair of uncooperative detectives. Getting a good detective on your case is much the same as getting lucky with a skilled surgeon.

  And to my knowledge, to this day, they still refuse to look at new information. However, in the next county over, the detectives and district attorney who prosecuted Scotty May all say, “We know Scotty May killed Mary Beth Townsend.” If they had had the case, charges against Scotty May would have gone forward.

  I UNDERSTAND WHY the investigators immediately suspected Sam Bilodeau.

  In the beginning of the investigation, they wouldn’t have known what time of day Mary Beth Townsend was killed. They did not know if it had been six, eight, or even ten hours before she was discovered, and they hadn’t known about the lunch date she missed, so they did not have their time frame down yet. They didn’t have the full autopsy saying that she had been strangled. The police had a dead woman in a closet, apparently with a blow to the head, and there was no sign of breaking and entering.

  Her fiancé said, “I came home, she wasn’t there, I didn’t know what happened to her, and I fell asleep. When I got up, I found her in the closet.”

  Uh-huh, really?

  I do not put down the police department for its original views. I would have that same thought. Nothing wrong with that. When you’re talking about a crime that just occurred, you have to go with the most likely theory. Women are most often killed by boyfriends or husbands, not by strangers, serial killers, or burglars. Domestic homicide tops the list of likely places to start. The police detective will obviously go there first. He’s got the guy in the chair. He’s going to take his chance to talk to him. However, he shouldn’t put words into his mouth. And he certainly shouldn’t pursue the domestic angle just because the truth is less convenient.

  The police had a reason to suspect Sam. Maybe he moved Mary Beth’s car to the other side of town and took the train back; the couple’s condominium was close enough to transportation for that to be plausible. I have another case where that’s exactly what happened. A white man committed a murder, moved the car to a poor black neighborhood, and tried to make it look like the perpetrator was a black man. Why? Because the white killer lived four doors down from the neighbor he murdered and he wanted the police to look elsewhere. It’s not necessarily racist; it’s just smart for a criminal to point law enforcement to an area where nobody looks like him and the location is poor enough or has a high enough crime rate to make it feasible that a criminal lived there.

  For an innocent man, Sam did all the right things. He came home. He made phone calls to find his fiancée. That seems like normal behavior, but a lot of people ask, “With his fiancée missing, if he was really worried about her, why did he just go to sleep? How could he do that?”

  This is a gender issue. If it was a woman and her boyfriend was missing, that woman would not sleep. That woman would have been pacing the floor all night long, cussing and saying, “He better be dead, because if he’s not dead, then he’s going to be dead when he gets home.” She would be standing there at six a.m., still fuming, when that man walked in. And if he was fine, she’d kill him. That’s the way a woman thinks. A guy will go, “I don’t know where she is…Zzzzzzzz.” And he’ll fall right to sleep. It’s amazing. Men will snooze under even the most stressful circumstances.

  Sam’s going to sleep did not surprise me. He was annoyed, he was aggravated, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he did what a guy does, he slept. When he did wake up, somewhat rested and thinking clearly, he finally noticed that the closet door was closed.

  To the police, who didn’t know Sam Bilodeau at that point, it sounded like a strange story. And then, of course, he found the car, which made things worse for him, but because he was driving home from Mary Beth’s father’s and the highway ran close to Scotty May’s house, that just happened to be where the car was dumped.

  But ultimately, there was too much evidence to the contrary to continue being suspicious of Sam.

  At a certain point, the police should have said, “The evidence shows that it’s not Sam Bilodeau.” He lost his fiancée. He pays taxes. He deserved to be treated like a man grieving a horrible loss, not a common felon.

  The detectives never talked to Sam again after his “confession.” He waited around a year for the police, and nobody ever came back to him. He didn’t know what to do. That indicated to me that they weren’t thinking it was him, but they didn’t know where to turn next.

  This is a huge problem that I hope to help more police departments solve in the future. Cases are solved by everybody working together. The medical examiner helps us understand how the person died. The crime photographer gets good photos that we can examine for clues. A ballistics expert on a case can tell us about the caliber of bullets when appropriate. There might be forensic evidence. The community might give us tips on who it thinks could have committed the crime—if we ask for the help and then listen to the answers. When all these people get together, the profiler is just a part of a larger team. Even in this case, I had the help of the family and the community to unravel the case. The police need to stop looking at it as “our” case and start looking at it as the victim’s case. That’s a big problem.

  Criminal profiling is still a relatively new concept, and since there’s been so much mythology about criminal profiling and some foolishness promoted about criminal profiling, profilers are sometimes considered gods—and sometimes they’re considered frauds.

  IS IT WORTH profiling a homicide if law enforcement doesn’t care? If it isn’t prosecuted, is it worth it?

  Absolutely yes.

  In Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, her son, Art, got the answer he prayed was true: the fiancé of his mother wasn’t somebody he had to hate the rest of his life.

  The fiancé, Sam Bilodeau, got some relief that somebody believed he didn’t kill his fiancée, that there was an answer out there.

  More recently, I received a letter from Sam Bilodeau’s sister, thanking me profusely for helping with the case, because it was such a horrible thing for her brother to live through with this cloud hanging over his head. When I spoke out in the media as to why Scotty May should be the top suspect in Mary Beth’s death and explained how he—and not Sam Bilodeau—was most likely to have committed the crime, I provided some peace of mind to her family. It took her years to deal with it and write a letter thanking me, but it was a beautiful thing to receive, ten years after I worked on the case. We know that Scotty May is not going anyplace. He’s in jail for life. I know the Townsend family would like him prosecuted for what he did to Mary Beth, but at least I could clear Sam Bilodeau’s name to some extent so he could go on in his life and I could give Art some closure, too. That is indeed worth it, even if I can’t say the case was prosecuted or the police ever formally exonerated Sam.

  It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but there are folks who can tell you that this is an old wives’ tale. Art Townsend can tell you that crime also can strike twice in the same place. Following his mother’s death, Art put the condo
up for rent. A nice young man who did government work, Vincent Poor, moved in. The very next year after Mary Beth was murdered, in 1999, the police department had another crime go unsolved.

  Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.

  Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.

  He sold the unit.

  CHAPTER 8

  DORIS

  THE UNLIKELY VICTIM

  The Crime: Murder

  The Victim: Doris Hoover

  Location: Midwestern United States

  Original Theory: Husband either did it or hired someone to commit the crime

  I arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.

  I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.

  “Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.

  I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.

  After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.

  When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.

  “Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.

  I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.

  “The case files are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”