by Jim Wygant
8. Murder Suspects
I am convinced that many murders that do not arise from domestic disputes, murders primarily associated with drugs or robbery, occur only because persons who would not kill alone will drop that reluctance in the company of others. Gang shootings are the most conspicuous example but are not unique. A certain kind of man may kill or participate in murder if he thinks his friends expect it of him. Of course, someone who would casually place the esteem of his colleagues above someone else’s life has probably gotten into a lot of other trouble on his own, but his solitary acts don’t usually include murder. For many killers, an audience is required.
Within a single year I conducted tests in two separate cases in which closet homosexuals, both working in responsible white collar jobs, were murdered by teenaged boys they had picked up on a downtown city street. In each case more than one boy was involved. And in each case the teenaged murderers had previously sold sex without expressing any need to kill anyone. But when more than one of them was prostituting himself with the same male homosexual client, they were compelled to confide to one another their loathing for what they were doing, and they hatched inept plans to steal from the victim. The intended thefts became murder. The boys had probably wanted to humiliate their victims, and they imposed the ultimate humiliation, death that betrayed the victims’ secrets.
Although they spoke of theft, murder may have been what the boys intended all along, the thrill of exercising the greatest power that one person can claim over another, the power to steal life. These were boys who otherwise saw themselves as relatively powerless in a society they scorned, and which they believed was hostile toward them. All of the suspects in both cases were apprehended, mostly because they could not resist talking about what they had done.
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The surrender to peer pressure and the urge to talk about the experience afterwards are common characteristics of the most sadistic kind of murder, the one in which the murderer does not consciously select a victim but rather deliver violence upon whatever poor soul chance puts in his path. Those are cases in which the police initially have no suspects. They are murders that we imagine could strike any one of us, because the victim had done nothing unusual to provoke his or her attacker. They are also the least common murders, contrary to what television depicts. Most murders arise out of petty disputes between two parties, often lovers or ex-lovers. The suspect is usually close by when the police arrive. He or she often confesses at the least urging of the police. But when police encounter a slaying in which there are no witnesses, no known dispute, and no evidence to identify the killer, they know their work will be difficult. Such cases are often solved only because of loose talk by the suspect to his friends. Even after the police begin to focus on a suspect, he is not as likely to confess as a distraught lover who has killed the object of his or her affection. The murder of Anthony Crisp was that kind of crime.
Crisp was an old man on a meager pension. He lived in a rented travel trailer. The trailer was on the property of a woman whose 19-year-old son had already made himself known to the police through years of misadventure. Jon Michael Hyde dropped out of high school in the second year. He had no skills. He worked when he felt like it at construction jobs and house moving. He stayed with his mother when she would let him. He liked to drink and smoke marijuana. His friend since childhood, Bruce, shared the same interests. In their eyes, life couldn’t be better. The world was generally operating the way they thought it should, providing them with most of what they needed but asking practically nothing in return. They did what they wanted. They didn’t take any crap off of anybody. Their only complaint was that money for beer and marijuana was sometimes scarce, and working to get it was a pain in the butt.
At the time of the murder, Jon Hyde was living with his girlfriend. Bruce often joined them in the evenings for beers and marijuana. One night a friend of Bruce’s, Scott, also joined them.
Jon Hyde later characterized Scott as half-crazy, unpredictable. Of course, at that point Jon was trying to defend himself by attributing both a robbery plan and its fatal climax to Scott. The plan, as uncomplicated as most of those devised to commit a crime, was to steal money from old Crisp who lived alone in his small trailer on the same property as Jon’s home.
Of the three suspects, it was Jon Hyde who knew the victim’s circumstances, had visited him in the trailer, and had previously lived in the trailer himself. Jon had known Crisp for about three years. Crisp had taken him fishing. It was improbable that the other two suspects, who knew almost nothing about Crisp, would decide on their own to rob him, but that was what Jon Hyde claimed.
Jon revealed to the other two that he had bought marijuana for Crisp once and been paid more than $300 in cash. The three young men decided to call upon Crisp that very night. They stopped and bought some beer to take with them. They could pretend to offer it in friendship, and hope that Crisp drank enough to pass out. Beyond that, there was no specific plan except to steal Crisp’s money. The fact that Crisp lived in a cheap travel trailer and was known to provide for himself from a small pension did not suggest to the thieves that Crisp might not have much.
There was no indication at the death scene that Crisp had resisted the killers. The door had not been forced. When Crisp greeted his visitors, he would have seen that one of them was Jon Hyde, the son of the woman from whom he rented. That probably eased any doubts he might have felt about the other two, who were strangers.
Crisp’s body was found the next day in the blood spattered trailer. He had been savagely beaten about the head. The coroner concluded that two different blunt weapons were likely, because of differences in some of the wounds. Crisp had also been stabbed in the throat, although that had been unnecessary if the purpose was to kill him. Any one of several skull fractures would almost certainly have accomplished that, according to the coroner. No weapons of any kind were found by police.
The would-be thieves got a small amount of money — Jon said later that his own share was $40 — and a pillow case full of Crisp’s personal possessions. Those items included a pistol. The stolen goods were never recovered, so the fate of the gun remains unknown. The killers later said they were afraid of being traced by the goods, so one of them buried the lot in a place that no one could locate later. I have never known a criminal to bury a good pistol, but anything is possible.
I encountered Jon Hyde in custody, where he had already been for several weeks. It had not taken the Sheriff’s Office long to identify likely suspects and to get each of them to blame the entire incident on the other two. The irony of this familiar game is that the police know very well how to play it, but the criminals themselves never seem to figure it out.
Jon claimed that crazy Scott had done the murder. He said that Scott had suddenly pulled out a steel bar and struck the victim across the face. Jon said that blood splattered onto him and that he immediately left the trailer and waited outside while the murder was finished. He denied participating or knowing that a murder was going to be committed.
He described the bar as an extension handle for a socket wrench set. He guessed that it was nearly two feet long. He said that until Scott pulled it out of his clothing, he had not been aware that Scott was carrying it. His attorney said that he believed him. The attorney wanted me to conduct an examination that would confirm Jon’s story and get a favorable plea bargain from the District Attorney.
There were a few problems with Jon’s story. The most serious was that the person he accused, Scott, was himself claiming that his two companions, Jon and Bruce, made all of the fatal wounds. He also said that they used a police baton or nightstick. Bruce was known to have a nightstick that he had pilfered from a brief job he held as a security guard. Beyond that, Jon had virtually destroyed any credibility he might have had with the Sheriff’s Office when he had failed to cooperate with their earliest inquiries.
When the Sheriff’s Office first suspected Jon’s involvement in the murder, and before they k
new about his two pals, they asked Jon to undergo a polygraph examination with their own examiner. He agreed, but he made obvious deliberate distortions on his charts and then said that he had smoked marijuana in the parking lot before coming into the court house. They asked him to return for a second test, which he did. This time he was more cooperative, but he produced results indicating that he was lying. He told them he had done poorly because he had been concealing information. He said he had heard who had committed the murder. He gave them a name. The Sheriff’s Office checked and quickly became convinced of two things: the person Jon named had nothing to do with the murder, but Jon did.
I found Jon Hyde sullen and reluctant to talk about the crime. It was only by asking direct questions that I was able to get him to repeat his version of what happened. He was obviously worried, but what struck me more was his conspicuous lack of any remorse or any sympathy for the brutally murdered victim. When I asked Jon for his opinion about what should happen to whoever really killed Crisp he snapped back, “Whatever. I don’t know. This is a bunch of bullshit.” In Jon’s consideration, there was no reason for him to be locked up. It was the most common of jail complaints: unfair treatment.
I asked Jon if he had hit, shoved, restrained, or used any other kind of physical force on the victim. It would not have been unusual, even if Jon had not delivered a fatal blow. I knew that if he withheld information about his own use of non-lethal force, he would jeopardize his polygraph test, even if he had not delivered a mortal injury. He denied any use of force and stuck to the claim that he had left the trailer as soon as the first blow was struck.
We began the test. I used an eight-question format in which two of the questions asked directly about the murder. The first asked, “That night in the trailer, did you yourself do any injury to Crisp with your own hands?” The second asked, “Did you inflict any of those injuries that resulted in the death of Crisp?”
Ordinarily in a murder issue I would make reference to the method of death. The questions might ask “did you fire the shot” or “did you strike the blows” or “did you stab”, but in this particular case the questions had to be broad enough to encompass both the blows about the head and the stab wound in the neck.
We went through the same eight questions three separate times while the instrument recorded physiological changes. Although I intended to score the charts later, it was obvious by the end of the third chart that Jon had produced strong indications of lying to the two questions about the murder.
I set that test aside without telling him the results or indicating that there had been any kind of problem. His attorney wanted me to test him on two other issues, neither of which was as suitable for testing as the one we had just finished. The second test asked whether Jon had stolen anything out of the trailer. The third test asked whether he had seen crazy Scott strike Crisp, as he claimed. Both of those tests produced inconclusive results. I suspected that Jon was thoroughly distracted by the primary issue of whether he participated in the murder. Any other issue was not likely to sufficiently capture his attention for test purposes.
I scored the charts and told the attorney the results. He was surprised at my conclusion that Jon had actively participated in the murder. He asked about further testing. I told him I believed that at the very least Jon was withholding material information. Jon would continue to produce unfavorable test results until he truthfully described what happened. The attorney happily grasped the possibility that Jon had not participated but had produced bad test results because he might be covering for his friend Bruce. I told him that I considered that unlikely. It was more likely, in my opinion, that Jon had himself hit the victim.
Sometime later I heard that Bruce had also taken a polygraph test, had also flunked, and had implicated his long-time pal, Jon Hyde. Bruce claimed that Jon had hit the victim and had not left the trailer during the murder, as claimed.
Crazy Scott turned out to be not so crazy after all. According to his own version and that of Bruce, Scott was the only one of the three who had not done something to the victim. He was smart enough to work a deal with the District Attorney, agreeing to testify against the other two. The whole house of cards that Jon relied upon had begun to collapse.
Because a robbery was involved in the killing, the charge was aggravated murder, which meant a possible death penalty. The incentive for the defendants to bargain down to something less punishing was strong, and that is what happened. Both Bruce and Jon pleaded guilty to lesser murder charges and were sent away.
By all of their accounts, they had not even asked Crisp for his money. They had simply begun beating on him.
Although Jon never publicly disclosed the extent of his own participation, I remain convinced that he and Bruce both struck Crisp with two separate weapons, as the coroner had concluded. There was never any explanation for the knife wound to the neck. Both Bruce and Jon claimed that they didn’t know anything about any knife wound. Maybe they both realized that there was something more evil about that one wound. Stabbing a vulnerable person in the neck seemed more cowardly and more deliberate than the compulsive act of hitting. These young men had hit other people without killing them, but they had never before stabbed anyone to death.
Except for Jon and Bruce, probably no one else will ever know which of them was possessed of so much unmitigated violence and hostility that he would stab a dying man through the front of his neck with enough force to nearly sever his spinal cord. The one who did it may have already convinced himself that it was nothing special, that the victim deserved it and was already dead or dying anyway, and that the consequences of years in prison were unfair.
9. Wrongly Accused
Hollywood has for years been drawn to the drama that naturally arises from the circumstances of a man wrongly accused of murder. While that certainly is a dramatic theme, it is offenses less serious than murder that are more apt to result in a wrongful conviction. The State routinely provides the murder defendant not only with an attorney but extra resources not available to those who commit lesser crimes. An appointed attorney in a murder case is likely to be more experienced at criminal law than the average defense attorney, and he probably will secure extensive public funds to hire private investigators and his own forensic experts. Jury selection in a murder trial will take longer, and the judge will probably be more cautious during trial, not wanting to allow anything that might get him or her reversed on appeal.
What we sometimes forget is that none of those perquisites, beyond the fundamental provision of an appointed attorney for the indigent, is routinely available for lesser offenses. If injustices are going to occur, it is likely that they will arise from cases involving charges less serious than murder, of which there are many more.
Although any mistake is cause for concern, no single wrongful conviction means that the existing criminal justice system is a failure. Most people who are arrested are guilty of what they are accused of. Some are not, and a few of those get convicted anyway. The same system protects many who are guilty, sometimes to the extent that they are acquitted. Mistakes would be inevitable in virtually any system that relied upon human judgment.
We tend to remain ignorant of the wrongly accused because the complaints filed against most of them are seldom serious enough to command the attention of the news media. It is the news media that tell the average citizen most of what he knows about crime. When a relatively insignificant criminal complaint results in an injustice, we don’t hear about it on the six o’clock news and no one conducts a vigil outside the courthouse in protest. Usually nobody knows or cares about these cases besides the few people whose lives were directly touched by them.
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There was once a jail in Portland, Oregon, known as Rocky Butte, named for the hill that rose just west of it. The jail had been built in the 1930s as one of many federal projects intended to help restart an economy disabled by the Great Depression. Because labor was cheap and plentiful, there was an incentive in go
vernment projects to overbuild. Rocky Butte was constructed from large blocks of stone hewn from local quarries. It had a crenellation along the top, giving it the appearance of a medieval castle. The massive style was similar to the protective stone walls built along the cliff-side highway in the Columbia River Gorge during the same period. Eventually county government leveled Rocky Butte Jail to accommodate a new freeway and light rail line. Before that happened, I tested two men at Rocky Butte who were both innocent. They had both waited several months in that facility before I had been summoned to test them. I saw them only a few months apart.
When I arrived at Rocky Butte to test Clarence Dillon I parked as usual in the gravel lot, among the jailers’ cars. I carried my equipment to a locked gate in a high steel mesh fence that surrounded the building. I pressed a button and waited for the speaker horn above me to crackle to life. I had phoned ahead to let them know I was coming.
“Can I help you?” the voice from the speaker asked.
“My name is Wygant. I’m here to do a polygraph on Clarence Dillon.”
No further reply came, except that the electric lock on the gate snapped loudly once. I pushed the gate open and went into the yard. The gate slammed and locked behind me as I crossed the yard to a solid steel door with another electric lock. It cranked open slowly on a motor and began to close again as soon as I had slipped in with my equipment. At the desk inside was the usual chaos — one man in uniform trying to answer questions and detail prisoners to various destinations, one or two other uniforms standing around chatting and sipping coffee.