by Pat Brown
His mother was in Chicago and they notified her that her son was in critical condition with kidney failure.
“Oh, do you think I should come?” she asked.
The nurses said, “What the heck’s wrong with this woman? She doesn’t want to come?”
Three days later she arrived via Greyhound Bus.
When she came into her son’s hospital room, she didn’t say hello to him, give him a hug, or ask him how he was feeling. She didn’t even bother to look in his direction. Instead, she started chatting up the nurses: “Thank you, thank you, you are such wonderful people. I so appreciate what you’ve done. You’re helping my son. That’s so marvelous. What’s this piece of equipment? Oh, what does this do? How does that flush out the kidney?”
I looked at the boy’s mother, thinking, She’s paying no attention to her son whatsoever! I got graveyard chills from this woman. I began to wonder if she had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a disorder in which a person, usually a woman, harms her children for attention. These women love to visit hospitals and interact with doctors and nurses, being in the spotlight and the center of a drama. It is a type of psychopathy.
Women who hurt, smother, or kill their own babies are the most common presentation of Munchausen syndrome. These psychopaths murder their babies one after the other and hope the doctors think it’s sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. And most of the time they do-that is, until someone realizes it has happened nine times. Many of these women are interested in the nursing profession in some manner or form. They like to be involved in medical procedures, because it gives them the thrill of controlling life and death. They like pulling plugs and causing emergencies so they can be heroes when they save the patients. Or they like to watch everyone else scurry about trying to save the person they just sent into cardiac arrest. They also love a good funeral.
When this mother eventually sat down next to her son, he looked at her like she was a big cockroach and he moved away from her. I thought, That’s an odd response to your mother. For the rest of the day the mother ignored him and spent almost no time tending to her poor, miserable son, but she said to the nurses, “I can’t leave his side. No, I can’t go down to eat now, I must stay with him.” Yet she never looked at him. The woman enjoyed talking with me about herself. She bragged about this and that and most of what she said was not all that believable. She never talked about her son, about how he was doing in college or about his deafness, nor did she express any worry over his possible future demise. She was narcissistic and grandiose and lacked empathy for her own flesh and blood, all traits of a psychopath.
I wondered if this woman could be the Munchausen type who liked working in the medical field.
I said to her, “Are you a nurse?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, beaming at me.
“Do you work in a nursing home?”
“Yes.”
“Midnight shift?”
She nodded, looking at me suspiciously, wondering how I knew that.
I thought, I wonder if they have any suspicious deaths at that nursing home?
I asked the nurses if they knew where the son had been recently. They said he had just gotten back from visiting his mother in Chicago when his kidneys failed.
I thought about whether the mother administered something from the nursing home to her son, some kind of drug that caused kidney failure. I asked whether they had tested him for drugs or any kind of medications that could be available in a medical setting, and they said no, because they had no reason to test for that. Yet none of the tests they had done offered any clue as to why this boy’s kidneys had suddenly gone into failure.
When I couldn’t stand being alone with my suspicions another minute, I went to the hospital authorities. “Look,” I said, “I’m breaking the code of ethics but I cannot stand by and watch this. I’m not saying I know that this woman did anything to her son. I’m saying you need to test for medications that she could have gotten from her place of work.”
I explained Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and they all looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. They didn’t know a thing about it. That’s not surprising; most medical staff never learns of this form of psychopathy and that’s why so often women get away with it.
The blank looks told me they just weren’t getting it. I said, as I was leaving the room, “If he ever ends up dead in the future, you better check that mom out.” The young man survived, and I hope he was smart enough to never get near her again.
ONE NIGHT I received a phone call from Washington Hospital Center -they needed an interpreter on a rape case.
I went in and the victim was Rochelle, a deaf woman I knew from many previous visits.
“Rochelle-you were raped?”
“Yeah.”
She was smiling at me when she signed it. I thought, You don’t look too bent out of shape for a rape victim.
She went through the whole process.
Medical technicians papered the floor, removed her clothes and put them on the paper, and the doctor performed the rape kit. Afterward, the police came in and talked with her through me.
She claimed that she got off a bus and was attacked and raped by a man in an alley. But after the doctor and the police detective left the room, she brightened up and started digging around in her purse for her photo book.
“Hey, wanna see my pictures from the Christmas party?” she asked cheerfully.
I oohed and aahed over her various poses with friends and then she asked me how my kids were doing and I told her some funny stories and she laughed. But when the doctor returned, she “got sad again” very quickly.
The very next night, my pager went off again at midnight, this time from DC General, and there was another rape victim waiting for an interpreter.
Sure enough, it was Rochelle.
“Rochelle, did you get raped again?”
“Yes!” She looked at me with an amazed, innocent expression.
Apparently she got off another bus and got raped for the second time in two days. Of course, the doctors did their job, she got the rape kit done again, and Rochelle got a great deal of attention. She was mad they didn’t have any crackers available that night.
I SAW WHAT a lot of people would never see, because they see only what a person presents to them. When a doctor encounters a patient, the patient is ready for the doctor, and the doctor observes only what happens in the ten minutes that he or she is in the room with the patient.
As an interpreter, I sat in rooms with patients sometimes for up to twenty-four hours straight, so I learned a lot about those patients. Many told me stories about their entire lives. Some would ask me for food; some for other favors. I would get all the lowdown on them, and when they switched hospitals to play the game on the next well-meaning but oblivious medical professional, I was often the interpreter there, too. Most of my clients were nice people, but there were those who were not. These were the users and abusers and the criminals, and among them there were a number of psychopaths. There are a lot more psychopaths in society than people realize, and deaf people can be psychopaths, too. They murder, they rape, and sometimes they rape deaf girls because they know they won’t hear them coming. This kind-the deaf psychopaths-lied in front of me all the time to the doctors. They knew I knew, but they didn’t care that I knew because I couldn’t say anything.
I saw behind the charade that psychopaths use to fool people. Psychopaths, whenever they encounter a particular person they want something from, put on their game face-they lie and manipulate-and I was in the unusual situation of watching them ply their trade.
AND SO THAT was my life. I taught my kids and I worked at the hospitals. When the kids were a little bit older, I worked at night a lot more. When my husband was home, I could go down to the emergency room and work all night, and I managed to live that life for ten years.
That would have been the totality of my life if, along the way, Walt Williams hadn’t moved into our spare room as a boarder.
MY HUSBAND WORKED hard.
He was an engineer for Siemens Medical Systems, where he still works today, fixing x-ray equipment. He was a very, very good father to the kids. We had a family bed when the children were babies. He slept with our daughter on his chest, put her to sleep when she wasn’t nursing, and, as the children got older, he was always involved with their activities.
When they were of school age, he was the soccer coach in town. Everybody loved him. He was involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs. He was a great dad.
Our life as husband and wife, however, had its problems. None stemmed from being of two different cultures or races. I had his support for homeschooling the children and being a sign language interpreter. The years of investigating Walt after that fateful day at the police station was another matter.
When the Walt incident occurred, he did not support me in going to the police because, he said, “Why cause yourself this trouble?” which really meant, “Why cause me this trouble?” “Just forget about it,” he told me. On the other hand, oddly enough, he did nothing to stop me from pursuing more information about Walt after the police took no action. On rare occasions, he would be curious and ask, “Did you find out anything about Walt today?” When I started investigating Walt, even he found it fascinating-not my work, but the stories I told about him.
Tony did not really believe that Walt was a killer. He did not believe it was necessary for me to do what I did. He did not believe I would be able to do anything. He saw me as a homemaker. This is the man who saw me pregnant. This is the man who saw me birth our children. This is the man who saw me nursing twenty-four hours a day for more than two years with one child, then two years with another, babies always with me, the absolutely devoted mother. This is the man who saw me kneading bread on the table and playing games on the floor with my children and holding them on my hip while I tried to get things done in the house.
He always said two things about me: “You’re honest” and “You’re intelligent.” Those were the two things he respected about me, but he didn’t think I could take what intelligence and schooling I had and apply it practically. He didn’t see me as being able to understand psychology and getting into profiling and detective work. To him, that was something completely foreign. He thought I was being grandiose in my goals.
When I later wanted to pursue criminal profiling as a career, he said he couldn’t see the point, I was already a successful sign language interpreter, and he didn’t seem to understand I wanted to achieve something different at this point in life. He was a man who didn’t like change and wasn’t interested in risk taking; he thought I should just give up my mission.
So when I came home at the end of a day of being insulted by local law enforcement, he didn’t say, “Don’t worry, honey. I believe in you.” He went about his business and I went about mine.
I wish I had been a criminal profiler before I got married; then maybe I could have seen the writing on the wall before I stepped up to the altar. After twenty-five years of marriage, I ended up divorced, my family torn apart. If I feel even one hundredth of the pain a family destroyed by the murder of their child experiences, I can’t begin to imagine how they endure. I at least still have all my children. They don’t.
CHAPTER 3.WALT:THE SUSPECT
In 1990, the police did nothing with the evidence I brought to them following the murder of Anne Kelley. But in spite of my nerve-racking, dead-end experience at the police station, I still assumed the detectives would be knocking on my front door within an hour to interview Walt Williams. If they had, they might have gotten the evidence they needed to make him a person of interest. The day after the murder, Walt went off on a hike. He put on long pants and a long shirt to leave the house, and I thought, God, that looks uncomfortable. It was a hot, muggy day in June, and while I knew he was headed to a wooded area where it made sense to cover your legs for mosquito and tick protection, he’d never done it before. Why all of a sudden, when he always wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, was he suddenly covering himself from head to toe? Was he covering scratches on his body?
If the police had interviewed him right away, as I begged them to, they could’ve said, “Roll up your sleeves,” and they might have seen scratches.
Anne Kelley was murdered on Saturday and the evidence was in their hands on Monday, less than forty-eight hours later. They’re gonna come. They’re gonna do what they have to do, I thought. We’d all breathe a sigh of relief, and that would be it. I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted the case to be handled, my life to return to normal, and Walt to go away.
TONY TOLD WALT -on my insistence-that he had to leave our home. The day after I went to the police, Walt walked out my door and kept right on going, without ever being considered a suspect.
I was left in a complete void, not understanding what the heck had happened. It was like being in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. It shook my sense of reality. Was I making connections where there were none? The police were not impressed by anything I told them, making me feel that I was a delusional housewife and just making stuff up.
But I never said I knew Walt Williams was the killer of Anne Kelley. What I said was that his behaviors were in line with a person who could have committed her murder, that if one put together his admission of being on the path that night with the evidence I found in his trash and his bizarre behavior, an investigator should want to learn more about this guy. That’s what my brain told me. My information should have led the police immediately to consider him a suspect in this crime, yet it didn’t. That meant either the police were incorrect in their perceptions or I was a pitifully amateur armchair detective.
I COULDN’T GET what had happened out of my mind. I got the newspaper every day expecting I would open it and read, Walt Williams has been arrested for the murder, and I would go back to my normal routine. But time moved on and there was not another word in the paper about the crime. I waited and waited, and finally, confused, I stopped expecting to see a newspaper story with any developments in the investigation.
I went back to homeschooling my children and working nights as a hospital sign language interpreter. As for the police, they never called.
A rumor went around town that the killer of Anne Kelley was another young man, Michael Potter, age eighteen, who lived with his parents in a house that stood right where the path intersected with the road. Michael was known to have hung out with other teenagers in the area where Anne Kelley’s body was found. It was a woodsy area where they would party and smoke pot. The word was that this young man shot himself five days after the crime and that he was the one who murdered Anne.
I was stunned. That was why the police never contacted me. I guess it wasn’t Walt. I must be wrong.
It seemed that it was simply coincidental that Walt exhibited such strange behavior, had circumstantial connections to the crime scene, and junk tossed in his trash; maybe this other young man was equally as disturbed but the one who had actually committed the crime.
I tried to put it out of my head. I was wrong. Michael Potter was the guilty party.
Michael was said to have broken up with his girlfriend the same week Anne was killed. He called his girlfriend in the days following the homicide to tell her he was not happy about something he had done in his life. The thing he was “not happy about” was alleged to be the murder. Yet he never confessed to murdering anyone and no one seemed to know exactly what he was feeling despondent about.
I heard through the police grapevine that there was also supposed to be some blond hair at the scene. The boy had blond hair. And, more important, his DNA was there, and he had scratches in his genital area from the briar bushes.
I thought, Well, that’s pretty good. I don’t know if I could argue that one. There’s DNA, and there’s hair, and scratches. DNA is solid proof. His hair on her, if there was a root still attached, could provide mtDNA for analysis, not as absolute as DNA, but pretty useful as supportive evidence if the mtDN
A matched his. And how would he get scratches in the genital area unless he had his pants off and he was raping somebody? If the rumors were true and the evidence existed, he must be the guy.
* * * *
MEANWHILE, KIM TOLD me that Walt was let go from his job.
Right after he left, the company received a series of unusual bomb threats. Kim said that the man sounded just like Walt.
But as suddenly as the calls started, they stopped, and Walt dropped from sight. Kim never saw him again.
I WOULD HAVE left this whole miserable episode behind me if something hadn’t kept nagging at me. The police never actually stated that Michael Potter killed Anne Kelley, and nothing was ever written up in the newspaper about the case being closed. In theory, it could have been administratively closed because the suspect was dead, but with all that supposed evidence I would think they would let the community know that there was no longer a killer out there. This lack of clarification on the part of law enforcement irked me. Was the case closed or wasn’t it? Did they have positive proof that Potter was the killer or were they only guessing it could be him and no one was challenging their assumption?
I decided to talk to the Potter family. When I told Michael’s parents that I thought their son might be innocent of the murder of Anne Kelley, they welcomed me into their home.
The story they told me was really sad. They were grieving over their son’s suicide, and then five months later the police showed up and insinuated that he killed Anne Kelley. The family was stunned. Why would they accuse their son of doing that? It’s bad enough that a child committed suicide, but then to be told that he sexually assaulted and murderered a woman was another thing altogether.
They said he was always a sweet kid, that they didn’t see any violence in him. Michael wasn’t perfect; he had dropped out of school, and he did have a problem with his girlfriend. He was depressed. He felt like a failure. They believed that was why he killed himself. They couldn’t believe he had anything to do with Anne’s death.