Serial Killer Investigations

by Colin Wilson

  Eventually, Frank and Ottis Toole returned home to Florida, while Becky and Lucas continued ‘on the road’. In January 1982, a couple named Smart, who ran an antiques store in Hemet, California, picked them up, and for five months Lucas worked for them. Then the Smarts asked Lucas if he would like to go back to Texas to look after Mrs Smart’s mother, Kate Rich. He accepted their offer. But after only a few weeks, the Smarts received a telephone call from another sister in Texas, telling them that the new handyman was spending Mrs Rich’s money on large quantities of beer and cigarettes in the local grocery store. Another sister who went to investigate found Mrs Rich’s house filthy, and Lucas and Becky Powell drunk in bed.

  Lucas was politely fired. But his luck held. Only a few miles away, he was offered a lift by the Reverend Reuben Moore, who had started his own religious community in nearby Stoneburg. Moore also took pity on the couple, and they moved into the House of Prayer. There everyone liked Becky, and she seemed happy. She badly needed a home and security. Both she and Henry became ‘converts’.

  But Becky began to feel homesick, and begged Henry to take her back to Florida. And a few days later, pieces of her dismembered body were scattered around a field near Denton. And Lucas’s nightmare odyssey of murder was beginning to draw to a close.

  The American public, which at first followed Lucas’s confessions with horrified attention, soon began to lose interest. After all, he was already sentenced. So was Ottis Toole (who would also be later condemned to death for the arson murder of George Sonenburg). And as newspapers ran stories declaring that Lucas had withdrawn his confessions yet again, or that some police officer had proved he was lying, there was a growing feeling that Lucas was not, after all, the worst mass murderer in American history.

  It was a couple named Bob and Joyce Lemons who first placed this conviction on a solid foundation. An intruder had murdered their daughter, Barbara Sue Williamson, in Lubbock, Texas, in August 1975. Lucas confessed to this murder when asked about it by Lubbock lawmen. When the Lemons heard the confession they felt it was a hoax. Lucas said he recalled the house as being white, that he had entered by the screen door, and killed the newly married woman in her bedroom. It was a green house, the screen door had been sealed shut at the time, and Barbara had been killed outside.

  The Lemons went and talked to Lucas’s relatives, and soon came up with a list of the periods when he had stayed in Florida, which contradicted dozens of his ‘confessions’. But when they confronted Texas Ranger Bob Prince with these discoveries, he became hostile and ordered them out of his office.

  Unsurprisingly, Ressler’s own attitude to Lucas is sceptical. In Whoever Fights Monsters, he writes:

  By the time I interviewed Lucas, years after the controversy had died down, the dust had settled and Lucas said that he had actually committed none of the murders to which he had previously confessed. Under closer questioning, he did admit that since 1975 he had ‘killed a few’, fewer than ten, perhaps five. He just wasn’t sure. He had told all those lies in order to have fun, and to show up what he termed the stupidity of the police.

  This figure, however, is obviously as much an underestimate as Lucas’s original claim of 350 (or even, at one stage, 650) was an exaggeration. As noted above, many of Lucas’s claims were confirmed on investigation. It seems, on the whole, that he was probably telling something like the truth in his first statement that he had killed ‘about a hundred’.

  Ressler adds:

  It took several years for the Lucas fiasco to be resolved. The task-force member had been right, though: If we had had VICAP up and running at the time Lucas made his first startling admission, it would have been easy to see what was truth and what was falsehood in his confession. First, we would have asked the police departments to fill out VICAP forms on their unsolved murders and enter them into the computer system. Then we would have analyzed them by date, location, and modus operandi, and would quickly have been able to show that several of them had been committed on the same date in widely separated locations, thus eliminating the possibility that they were committed by the same man. By such processes of elimination, we would have narrowed the field very quickly and allowed investigators to concentrate on the real possibilities.

  Lucas, sentenced to several life terms as well as to death in the 1980s, began the usual process of appeal, then spent 13 years on death row. By June 1998, when it seemed that he could no longer delay the death sentence, then Governor George Bush commuted it to life imprisonment.

  Ottis Toole died in September 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Most Evil?

  Sadism, the enjoyment of another person’s suffering, is a relatively rare perversion. However, as Roy Hazelwood told Stephen Michaud: ‘... those who harbour it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime.’

  He was referring to Mike DeBardeleben, whose criminal career spanned 18 years. When he was arrested on 25 May 1983 it was not for murder or rape—although in both these fields he was a repeat offender—but passing counterfeit bills.

  The Secret Service had been trying to find him for three years. By 1980, one of its serious headaches was a counterfeiter they called the ‘Mall Passer’, who unloaded fake $20 bills in shopping malls all over the country by handing them over in exchange for small items like cigarettes and men’s socks, and taking the change. He obviously drove far and wide; in one year, he travelled to 38 states and unloaded as much as $30,000 in fake bills. It was the task of the hunters, led by Secret Service agents Greg Mertz, Dennis Foos and Mike Stephens, to try and discern some kind of pattern in his crimes and lay a trap. The number of fake bills passed in the Washington DC and northern Virginia area suggested that this might be where he lived.

  Police artist drew up sketches of the Mall Passer based on the descriptions of store clerks who had seen him, and these were passed to every mall he had ever visited. In the late afternoon of Thursday 25 April 1983, staff of the Eastridge Mall in Gastonia, North Carolina,

  were on the lookout for the Mall Passer, since a local FBI agent had worked out that this might well be his target that month. And when he offered a $20 bill in payment for a paperback book, the clerk thought he recognised the wanted man, and noted that the $20 bill did not seem genuine. At the first opportunity he called the security guard, only to discover that his cell phone was out of order. But the Mall Passer had now moved on to other stores, where he continued to pass counterfeit bills. Finally, the Mall Passer—a thin, dark-haired man with a tight, straight mouth—was followed to his car. Some sixth sense must have told the fugitive that he was being observed, for one clerk noticed that he was so nervous that he was shaking. The police arrived shortly after he had driven away.

  A month later, on 25 May the Passer was recognised by a bookstore clerk in West Knoxville, Tennessee, who dialled the police. The man had realised he was being tailed, and broke into a run, with two agents after him, when he found himself confronted by two policemen who had been summoned by radio.

  But the thin, tight-lipped man was totally uncooperative with the police, even though he knew they had found more counterfeit bills and stolen license plates in his car, as well as a large quantity of pornography.

  His wallet identified him as Roger Collin Blanchard, but his car was registered to a James R. Jones of Alexandria, Virginia. Fingerprint identification, however, revealed to be James Mitchell DeBardeleben II, known as ‘Mike’, and that in 1976 he had spent two yeas in jail for passing dud $100 bills.

  In his apartment investigators discovered a Yellow Pages directory with a tiny slip of paper in the pages listing storage facilities. And a visit to the one nearest his home uncovered a storeroom full of the kind of items that indicated a car thief, and someone who posed as a policeman—a police badge, bubble lights, handcuffs, and a siren. And together with more pornography, they found dozens of photographs of women in various stages of undress, many looking terrified an
d battered. There could be little doubt that these latter were not posed by models—a bag containing bloodied panties, a chain, handcuffs, a dildo, and a lubricant suggested why the women looked so terrified. There were also tapes that made it clear that DeBardeleben enjoyed having women at his mercy—and forcing them to say that they were enjoying the rapes and tortures he was inflicting on them.

  In his study of DeBardeleben, Lethal Shadow, Stephen Michaud remarks that investigators concluded that he was ‘the most dangerous felon ever at large in America’. Michaud also comments: ‘For Mike DeBardeleben, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control.’ ‘There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her,’ DeBardeleben wrote in his private journal. ‘To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the constant domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.’

  The problems with chronicling DeBardeleben’s criminal career were, as Michaud soon discovered, enormous. Even with the help of Roy Hazelwood, who had collected all the evidence that figured in DeBardeleben’s trials (no less than six), and which finally sent him to prison for 365 years, there was no possibility of constructing a timeline of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities. He had covered his trail far too well. Ted Bundy—about whom Michaud also wrote a book—continued to deny his guilt until his death sentence produced a state of desperation in which he was willing to bargain for time with confessions dribbled out piecemeal. DeBardeleben was never under this pressure, and so had no motivation to tell the whole truth. Michaud, like the police investigators, had to work backwards, telling the story in reverse order.

  For practical purposes, this began with DeBardeleben’s release from prison in May 1978, where he had spent two years for passing counterfeit bills.

  In the early hours of Sunday, 4 September 1978, DeBardeleben passed a 19-year-old nurse (whom Michaud calls ‘Lucy Alexander’) who had quarrelled with her boyfriend and was walking towards her home. He politely asked if he could help. She climbed into his luxury car. Minutes later he produced a police badge and told her she was under arrest for hitchhiking. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, and gagged and blindfolded her with adhesive tape. Two hours later they stopped at a house and he took her indoors. On a mattress on the floor he undressed her leaving the blindfold in place, and then raped her for an hour without reaching a climax. He then sodomised her, ordering her to call him ‘Daddy’. After a sleep, he drank root beer, smoked a cigarette, and forced her to fellate him. As she did this he abused her verbally—obviously an integral part of the pleasure of the rape.

  In lulls between further rapes, he told her about his former wife; ‘all she did was spend money’. During the next 18 hours she was raped four times vaginally and anally. Finally, he allowed her to dress, drove her to an isolated area, and released her.

  On the afternoon of 4 February 1979, Debardeleben went into the trailer sales office of a real estate company, and told the estate agent, 31-year-old Elizabeth Mason (again a pseudonym) that he was a federal employee about to be transferred to Arlington, Virginia, and was looking for a home for himself and his wife. He asked her to take him to see some houses in the $100,000 range. Finally, in an empty house, he pointed a .389 automatic at her. Recalling an article she had read by the TV hostess Carol Burnett, she decided to scream and yell and flail at him.

  He tried to shoot her, but the gun jammed. He then began hitting her with the gun. Eventually, declaring that he only wanted her purse and that he would then leave, he got her to agree to being tied up. This proved to be a mistake; when she was tied, he throttled her, banging her head on the floor and shouting, ‘Pass out, bitch.’ Finally she did.

  When she woke up, her slacks had been removed, and the man had taken her car. She was in such a state of trauma that it was two days before a detective could question her. Her head required 31 stitches. It was not until she was in the hospital that she realised that her sanitary pad was still intact and that she had not been raped.

  Towards midnight on IJune 1979, a 20-year-old woman (Michaud calls her ‘Laurie Jensen’) was on her way home from the convenience store she managed when a sedan car pulled up and the driver said, ‘Police,’ and ordered her into the car. Then he told her she was suspected of being an accomplice in a burglary.

  Soon he abandoned the pretence, and handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged her. There followed a two-hour drive, which ended when he made her walk into a house. There he undressed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. She noticed the small size of his penis. After achieving an erection with difficulty he sodomised her, ordering her to call him ‘Daddy’ as he did so.

  That afternoon he made her pose for photographs, tape-recorded her as she was forced to tell him how much she enjoyed what he was doing to her, and then locked her in a closet. He told her that he was resentful about a previous wife and wanted ‘to get back at all women’. After keeping her for 24 hours, with more sodomy and oral sex, he drove her to within a few blocks of her home.

  Frustrated investigators consulted the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and it was John Douglas who profiled the rapist. What he said was to prove remarkably accurate when DeBardeleben was finally arrested. Douglas said that men who did this kind of thing were raised by an overbearing, domineering mother, and had a passive father. He had probably been arrested in his teens, had been in the military, but would have such problems adjusting to discipline that he would probably have been discharged. He would also be sexually inadequate.

  DeBardeleben’s next attempt at abduction showed how his hatred of women could explode if he was resisted. On 1 November 1980, a 25-year-old named Diane Overton was pulled over at 4 a.m. by a man who claimed to be a policeman. He ordered her out of the car, and when she opened the door, snapped handcuffs on her wrists. When he put his hand over her mouth she bit him hard. She then began screaming and honking her horn. But in spite of being in the middle of a residential district, no one responded. He dragged her into his car, but she stalled it by kicking it out of gear. Then she managed to open the door and fell out. The open door hit a cement wall and jammed. He managed to get it free and drove at her; she twisted out of the way. But he turned at a closed gas station and drove at her again. She succeeded in escaping by hiding under a concrete stairway, and her attacker drove off. She was lucky to escape; in his fury, DeBardeleben would undoubtedly have tortured as well as killed her.

  Ten days after this kidnap, he went into a clothing store in southern New Jersey and abducted the clerk, an Italian-American Michaud calls ‘Maria Santini’. In the car, she was ordered to crouch with her head on the seat. In his home he undressed her and tied her up with rope, explaining that he was ‘into bondage’. He then told her he was a transvestite, and proved it by going into the next room and returning wearing a miniskirt and high heels. After taking photographs of her in various postures that he arranged, he moved her into the bedroom and took more bondage photographs, explaining that his method was known as a ‘Chinese hog-tie’. Then, after lying beside her, kissing her breasts, and fondling her vagina, he allowed her to dress, even giving her the sweaty turtleneck he had been wearing to replace a blouse he had cut off her. After that he drove her to some woods and left her.

  These were just a few of the crimes DeBardeleben committed between May 1978 and his arrest as the Mall Passer.

  After DeBardeleben’s capture, the investigators—still unaware that he was more than a skilful counterfeiter—began looking into his background. Born in 1940, his first arrest at the age of 16 was for carrying a concealed weapon. He had subsequently been arrested on charges of sodomy, murder and attempted kidnapping. But he had been in prison only twice, once for a parole violation and once for counterfeiting. A large part of the material seized in his storage facility consisted of handwritten pages in which he spoke about himself and his plans at length—one document described his longterm ambition as being to buy himself a house in a remote spot, where
he was not overlooked by neighbours, and turn it into a place where he could bring captive women and make them obey his every whim.

  Incredibly, it looked as if the authorities might be willing to forget all his criminal activities except passing dud bills. The reason, simply, was that following up his criminal career looked as it was likely to be a long and costly exercise. The Secret Service’s responsibilities began and ended with the counterfeiting case. Agent Jane Vezeris, in overall charge of the investigation, was outraged by the idea, and went to see her boss, Acting Assistant Director Joe Carlon. She took with her a tape in which DeBardeleben could be heard making various sadistic demands, while his victim screams in anguish.

  By chance, the director of the Secret Service, John R. Simpson, dropped in during the meeting, and heard the tape. When it was over, Simpson told Carlon: ‘Give them whatever they want,’ and left.

  The first step Agents Foos and Mertz took was to dispatch a Teletype about DeBardeleben’s arrest to all field offices. Soon they had a break. Agent Harold Bibb, of Shreveport, Louisiana, thought he recognised the photograph of DeBardeleben, and after staring at it for a quarter of an hour, recalled that it resembled an artist’s impression of a man who was wanted for the murder of a real estate agent, Jean McPhaul, in

  1982. The man had asked her to show him properties in Bossier City; he called himself ‘Dr Zack’. On 27 April the attractive 40-year-old had left her office in the morning, and when she failed to return, colleagues went looking for her. They found her in an attic, suspended by the throat from a rafter, drenched in blood from two knife wounds.

  The killing seemed motiveless—she had been neither raped nor robbed.