by Pat Brown
THERE WAS OTHER information that corroborated when the crime probably occurred:
A neighbor reported hearing loud “fussin’” between one and three in the morning. She didn’t hear anything break, just arguing.
There was light food in Renee’s stomach that should have been gone by morning had this attack happened at seven a.m.
Someone attacked Frank sometime after midnight. Who was there early in the morning? The only person I know of was Donnell Washington. Donnell admitted he was at Frank’s home. Donnell was someone Frank would have let in. And he was the last one known to see his mother, Renee, and Frank alive.
At seven a.m., when he returned to Frank’s home and knocked on the door, Donnell pulled some shenanigans-like a fast-talking con artist. He called relatives and told them, “I can’t get in!” But what if that was all a con?
It took him more than two hours to come back and finally kick the door in-if he actually did that, he must have had the gentlest touch in America -at ten a.m. Then he attempted to give Renee CPR.
This is one of those cases where, if you look at the physical evidence, it tells you a sure thing. And the statements of the people who were interviewed, when I paid attention to the right key points, gave us information that matched the physical evidence.
It’s one of those cases where the family could have shut up and not said so much, but by saying more and more, it seemed to me they implicated Donnell in the crime.
Donnell was extremely concerned about establishing the time of death. He wanted the police to believe it was seven in the morning. That was important to him. Why? Because we know where Donnell was at seven in the morning and he had his son as his witness. He was knocking on the door-but didn’t enter then. He even thought the killer might have been there at that time, because he saw a gray Cherokee parked outside, and somebody sped away. He implicated other people in the crime.
In his police interview, Donnell made a point of saying that he was never on time. But this particular day, oddly enough, he showed up exactly on time! He even got there early! On this date, he was methodical and did everything exactly correctly.
“When I kicked the door in,” he said, “I saw Frank on the fucking couch, dead. I knew my mom was fucked up, dead or something. I went in there; I panicked. I picked her up, turned her over, I tried to give her CPR. I knew; I just, I just couldn’t stop is what I did. I put her on the bed. I couldn’t leave her on the floor, so I picked her up off the floor. I knew I was fucking up, I knew I was fucking up when I did that. When I grabbed her, I couldn’t control myself.”
He tried to overexplain what occurred. He said he started CPR immediately on his mother, and then he moved her to the bed and continued CPR. His CPR statements were all out of context. Rigor had already set in. Can you imagine doing CPR on a person with rigor mortis? I don’t think so. And if the person was really stiff and their eyes were open and staring, you wouldn’t want to be doing CPR on them. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But you might fake doing it for a minute if you were trying to pretend to be saving her life.
Interestingly enough, he also said that he picked his mother up off the floor. But Renee had been stabbed heavily, and there was blood all over her. She was a mess. He said he did CPR, then picked her up, moved her to the bed, and performed CPR on her again. Before he moved her to the bed, he came out and leaned on his cousin’s car. But no blood was found on his cousin’s car. And neither the cousin nor the cousin’s girlfriend recalled seeing any blood on Donnell.
It had also been snowing, so bright red bloody footprints would have been easily spotted.
He also told the police that after trying to revive his mother, he knocked on a neighbor’s door. There was no blood on that door, either. How did a man who handled his bloody mother, held her head and pushed on her chest while he was doing CPR, have no blood on him and leave no blood anywhere he went? That was impossible.
Based on what I saw, Donnell never touched his mother until after his cousin left the scene. It was only when Donnell’s aunt and the police arrived that he moved his mother’s body to the bed and started CPR.
* * * *
AT TEN A.M., Donnell Washington was at the house for the third time in less than twelve hours and it was the second time in that period that he was in the residence.
None of this made a lick of sense.
I think that when the aunt arrived, followed by the police, Donnell tried to show himself as a distraught son. He did CPR on a very stiff stiff.
Donnell made yet another interesting statement.
He actually said that after he saw the slash on his mother’s throat, he started looking “for the motherfucking knife.” Most people, when they are at a crime scene and see somebody’s been killed, don’t usually look around for the murder weapon. That’s just not the first thing in a person’s head. Why would you be looking for the knife? Was the knife left there the night before? Because after the cousin was in the room with Donnell, the cousin suddenly jumped in his vehicle and fled. One of the questions I had was, did Donnell return at seven a.m. because he realized, Oh, my God, where is that goddamn knife? Did he then find it, call his cousin, and hand the knife off? That would explain why the cousin disappeared so quickly from the scene. That was one of the possibilities that I developed in the profile.
A person who commits a crime must manufacture a fact-based statement of events, finding a level of truth that fits the crime without revealing a truth he doesn’t want told. I believe Donnell wanted to come up with a fake story, but he had none. He borrowed liberally from the truth and tried to reconstruct it to a later time, a later place. It came off sort of true, because parts of it really did happen. I just didn’t believe it happened when he said it happened.
I TOOK ALL the statements that Donnell Washington made about coming to Frank Bishop’s home in the morning when he came with his son to pick up his mother and moved them back to one a.m., when he came over to get the car.
Donnell said, “I got out of that car, and I banged on the door. I was banging hard as hell, because I’m like, what the fucking hell, she knows I’m here.”
Is that what happened at seven a.m., or is that what happened when he went to pick up the car at one a.m.?
Clearly, Donnell was mad and getting madder. He got crazy about how he would have to kick the door in. He ranted and raved about kicking the door in. Why, if it was seven a.m., didn’t he just kick the door in if he thought something was wrong? His mother might be hurt, dying, or dead on the other side. Why didn’t he kick the door in? Why did he just talk about kicking the door in?
The answer seemed to me to be that he wasn’t worried about what was going on inside, he was just mad that nobody opened the goddamn door. He was pissed off because he was being refused entry-and it probably was sometime after the hour that Frank didn’t like to open his door. It probably wasn’t the first time he had been refused entry.
SUPPOSEDLY, DONNELL CALLED his mother when he wanted to come get the car and told her he was on the way. But if that was true, when he got there, why did he have to bang and bang on the door? At some point, Frank relented and let him in, maybe because he didn’t want him waking up the whole neighborhood.
“What took you so damned long to let me in?” Donnell might have asked Frank. “Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called earlier?”
Donnell was known to have problems controlling his anger and it was possible that Frank threatened to call the police if Donnell didn’t calm down, because Frank had done it before when Donnell’s temper flared up.
Donnell wanted his mother’s car keys. He wanted to be let in; he wanted what he wanted. My hypothesis is that Donnell went over to get the car, and they were too slow, so he became pissed off when Frank wouldn’t let him in, lectured him after he did, and threatened to call the police on him if he didn’t calm down. So Donnell killed them.
Here’s another thing Donnell said in his police interview: “I know she was fighting, man,
I know she was trying to hold on. I know my momma, man.”
He might have known she fought her attacker because he was the attacker. Maybe he watched her struggle. Frank went down without a fight but his mother, he knew, lasted longer.
In the early rounds of Donnell’s police interrogations, when they asked him about his mother and Frank’s relationship, he had nothing bad to say. None of the relatives had anything bad to say about Frank, either. But the longer the interview went on, the fewer nice things Donnell said about Frank. At one point he called him a coward. Why would he say that? Somebody killed his mother. Frank was the only one there, and Renee was dead, so it was Frank’s fault. He didn’t feel a bit sorry for Frank. He said Frank was the cause of it. Maybe he was telling the truth there.
Oh, and there was another great statement: “Frank was just a cool guy. All this shit I’m telling you now is shit, is just coming to me. I’m making this shit up.”
Donnell said he spit on Frank on the way out of the crime scene. Yet he told the police that Frank was a nice guy who treated his mother well. Why then would he think that this nice guy got his mother killed, and why would he spit on him?
I think he despised Frank because he felt that if Frank hadn’t antagonized him, none of this would have happened, and his mother wouldn’t be dead. In other words, Frank pissed Donnell off, Donnell killed Frank, and then he killed his own mother, and it was Frank’s fault.
Donnell also said, “I’m not fixing to go to prison behind this shit.”
Say what?
If you didn’t have anything to do with it, why would you be fixing to go to prison “behind this shit”? How was that possible? Donnell may have told the police that he could handle his mother’s death, but of course if he killed her, he wouldn’t have been too happy that her death was putting him in a bad situation. He said, “I’m trying to deal with this shit, and it’s hard dealing with it when I know what the fuck went on. I panicked. I just couldn’t stop. It’s what I did. I knew I was fucking up, I knew I was fucking up. When I grabbed her, I couldn’t control myself.”
These are statements about CPR he made, but that didn’t sound like a CPR statement. It sounded like murder.
And yet Donnell was never an official or unofficial police suspect.
I DON’T BELIEVE the police ever analyzed the double homicide crime scene.
An investigator has to go in and reconstruct a crime. Find out what happened first, second, third, and fourth. Look for inconsistencies. Discern whether all the evidence matches and not make assumptions. The detective possesses some information, he thinks it’s true, and decides to move on. Some establish a theory and then ignore or don’t listen to the evidence that fails to support that theory.
The police decided that since enough people were ticked off at Donnell Washington, one of them certainly killed his mother. So when Donnell was talking, they didn’t listen. They just let a victim’s family member talk. They did the interview, and that was the end of it.
It seemed like everybody involved had some form of drug involvement and they were all squirrelly.
This was a wonderful opportunity to put Donnell away. The police did not like Donnell. They wanted Donnell off the streets. He was a problem in their community, no question about it. He was a menace.
I honestly think they decided that this was a hit on the mother because of Donnell’s drug involvement and they simply did not thoroughly analyze the evidence or what Donnell said.
It seemed to me that the evidence was almost overwhelming that Donnell was involved in this crime. I read the interviews and to me they read like a confession. But if a detective gets his mind set a certain way, he won’t notice that. He simply won’t hear it or see it.
Most of the time, the police do hard work trying to track down the people they think are involved and gather the appropriate evidence, but if we forget to stop and analyze the crime, we’ll be wasting time, because it has nothing to do with what we are looking for. We can work hard-but for no reason.
This crime did not take me tremendously long to analyze. It was a fascinating case. There were a lot of details in it, but a week was the most I needed to profile it. I gathered all the physical evidence, went through all the interviews, and right away, these things jumped out at me, starting with Donnell’s police interviews.
The police did a great job interviewing him, because they got a huge amount of information from him that demonstrated to me that he was involved in this crime.
The downside of reaching such a conclusion was that by the time I got the case, law enforcement lost a year’s time and the knife was nowhere to be found. The police may have had a surrogate confession from Donnell but not a true one. Any blood evidence that might have linked Donnell to the killings, evidence at his place of residence for example, would be long gone. I suggested that they interview the cousin and see if they could get him to talk. When I left town, the case remained unsolved.
I NEVER TOLD anybody I was coming to town to investigate the Bishop and Washington murders. That’s one of my rules. When I go in, I want to work with the police and leave.
In this case, the family must have said something to the press because I heard that a reporter contacted the police: “The family told me there was a profiler in town. Did she help you?”
They said, “No.”
By the time I came up with my profile, the police probably didn’t have enough evidence to go forward with anything, so they let it lie. There was no sense-in their view-to admit that maybe they should have analyzed this crime better a year earlier. That’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about police training.
When my profile was done, I said, “You should be looking at this guy.”
I expected them to say something like, “We still like the drug thing, but boy, you’ve made some points… We never saw this confession thing. We better get Donnell back in here. We better get that cousin back in here and find out if he can corroborate anything that Donnell says. We need to find out why he drove off so quickly and if Donnell gave him a knife to dispose of. We better find that knife.”
Had that happened, they might have solved this crime. Instead, the case remained open. They told me they were still looking for drug connections. They were still looking for somebody other than Donnell Washington.
Sometimes, when I hear a police department say that they’re not looking at my suspect, I think, Did I really analyze this crime correctly? But there was an astounding amount of information that pointed to Donnell, and he walked away.
Here are the key elements of the profile I wrote about this case:
1. The attack occurred at Frank Bishop’s residence.
2. While Renee Washington often stayed overnight at Frank’s home, she did not do so all the time.
3. Renee’s car was not at the residence between the time Donnell picked it up (sometime around midnight) until he brought the car back at seven a.m. Unless the killer was very familiar with Renee Washington’s habits and was watching the residence, the killer would not know if she was there that night.
4. No one was permitted into the house without calling first. After ten p.m., Frank Bishop did not open the door to strangers. And sometimes not even for relatives.
5. Renee Washington was not dressed at the time she was killed. Frank was fully dressed and had his slippers on. He was in the front room. Renee was in the bedroom.
6. Frank was killed first.
7. Frank received the more violent assault in spite of the fact he fought back less than Renee.
8. Even if Donnell Washington had angered certain people, it would have been highly unusual for those people to take this kind of action. Rather than kill Washington ’s mother, it was more likely they simply would have killed Donnell. Donnell left alive would continue to be a problem. Killing his mother would make him more of a problem. Furthermore, it was not within the cultural mores of Donnell’s community to go around killing people’s mothers.
If Frank Bishop was
the target of the attack, what was the motive? Frank had been involved in drug activities and there were rumors that he may have turned or was about to turn state’s evidence. However, there was no proof that anything immediate was going to happen. Frank appeared to have been well liked by family and acquaintances. No one, at that point in time, seemed to have a grudge against Frank or have made any threats. It was unlikely that any of Frank’s business dealings were the cause of retaliation.
It was also unlikely that a hit man would use the methods of killing I saw at the scene. The tossing of the table and the sudden, violent attack on Frank would seem to be born of extreme anger, not a planned killing. The attack on Renee seemed to be more of necessity than anger. None of Renee’s blood is in the living room or on Frank, but Frank’s blood is mixed with Renee’s. It would seem an argument erupted between Frank and his killer and Renee was then eliminated because she was a witness. Only one person appeared to have been involved in the killing.
The time of death was also crucial in determining whether this crime was a stranger homicide, a hit, or a killing of a personal nature. While Frank Bishop was fully dressed, he was not in clothes one would expect for a man planning to attend a funeral that morning. Renee Washington was dressed for bed, in a nightshirt, panties, and a cap to cover her hair while she slept. Frank Bishop had nothing in his stomach. Renee had a yellow substance and a white meat substance and green pepper. Renee’s family has stated that Renee was not a big breakfast eater, but when she did eat, she would have cooked and eaten with Frank, not alone. There was no evidence of dishes or pans being used that morning. Renee most likely consumed an omelet late in the evening before coming to Frank’s place. The state of dress and the food remaining in Renee’s stomach put the time of the deaths relatively early in the morning. Add to this the statement of a neighbor that she heard “fussin’” sometime between one and three in the morning, and it was not a homicide that occurred at seven a.m.
Since Frank would not have permitted anyone access to the house that he did not expect, we could safely determine that this was not a stranger homicide.