Popular Crime

by Bill James

  John Joubert was executed in Nebraska in 1996. Pettit’s editor is still at large.

  Joubert’s eyes were a cold, gray color. Uncaring, piercing eyes. Like the eyes of a shark.

  —MARK PETTIT, A NEED TO KILL

  But then he turned around and looked at me and I saw his eyes. They were flat. Dead eyes. Shark’s eyes. It was exactly like looking into a shark’s eyes.

  —ANN RULE, THE I-5 KILLER

  His eyes reflected no more feeling than a shark, or a doll. Not like he was crazy, or anything like that. Just empty.

  —JAYE SLADE FLETCHER, A PERFECT GENTLEMAN (ABOUT MICHAEL LEE LOCKHART)

  It was his eyes that really got me. I’ll never forget them. They were like those of the shark in the movie Jaws. No pupils, just black spots. These were evil eyes that stayed with me long after the interview.

  —ROBERT K. RESSLER, WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS (WRITING ABOUT RICHARD CHASE)

  Equally disturbing to Freeman were the man’s piercing blue eyes; there was something dangerous and forbidding about his stare. Deep inside Garrow’s cloudy pupils was a faint glow, like that of a dying light bulb.

  —TOM ALIBRANDI, PRIVILEGED INFORMATION

  It was as if his eyes had no connection with any emotion he expressed. Whatever his mood—whether he was angry, jovial, or anything in between—his eyes remained the same. Empty … his stare was riveting, unsettling, with a malign intensity. What people remembered most about Gary [Tison] were those cold, hard eyes.

  —JAMES W. CLARKE, LAST RAMPAGE

  Gail’s heart thumped in her chest. She thought she would faint when Tom turned his eyes on her. They glinted like marbles.

  —CHARLES W. SASSER, HOMICIDE!

  “He’s got dead eyes,” Assistant District Attorney Charles Butts, 45, told his colleagues …

  “There was no sense of remorse,” Butts told his colleagues during the trial. “I can tell, because he has dead eyes.”

  —BOB STEWART, NO REMORSE (ABOUT KEN MCDUFF)

  “When I looked in his eyes it was—you hear of people who are chilled to the bone, well, I was chilled to my soul … I looked into his eyes and it was like, ‘I want to get out of here,’ and I felt chills down to my very toes—it was just ‘This is the guy.’ ”

  —PAROLE OFFICER RICHARD WOOD, QUOTED ABOUT DAVID CARPENTER IN THE SLEEPING LADY, BY ROBERT GRAYSMITH

  Guys, knock it off. There is absolutely nothing about the eyes of a serial murderer that is any different from my eyes or your eyes. If you could look at a guy’s eyes and see that he was a serial killer, women wouldn’t get into the car with them. It’s magical thinking, that somehow you can look in a person’s eyes and see into their soul, and it’s dangerous, because it encourages people to think that they can identify sociopaths just by looking at them.

  In the early 1980s, three women were murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the space of a little more than a year. The investigation into the deaths, which were apparently the work of a serial murderer, was assigned to Charles W. Sasser, who would

  a) Never catch the killer, and

  b) Write a book about his life as a homicide detective.

  The book, Homicide!, was published by Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster) in 1990 (not to be confused with David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets). Homicide! is essentially the story of the destruction of a man’s soul by the demands of police work. Wading in filth and evil, dealing constantly with the dregs of humanity, and perpetually compelled to be tougher than the vicious world he inhabits, Sasser finds himself becoming progressively more cynical, more dishonest, more vulgar, and less sensitive. His family is disintegrating, and he is drifting toward alcoholism. Sasser has lost faith in the criminal justice system within which he works, seeing that system manipulated by lawyers without conscience and judges without courage. This loss of faith in the system spikes his moral descent. He is aware of these changes within himself, and he despises them—yet he is unable to let go of the policeman’s world, in large part because he cannot accept his inability to solve the case of the three murdered women. The book is pretty good, and I’d recommend that you read it.

  Sasser was an exceptionally good detective, at least if we can believe his own account of his career. But the book is as interesting for what Sasser doesn’t understand as it is for what he does. The key sentences in the book occur on page 54, at the beginning of Chapter Eight:

  Every cop knows most homicides are committed by someone the victim knows—wife, husband, son, uncle, friend, neighbor, the local grocer or bookie. That’s true even in sex killings like Martin, Rosenbaum and Oakley. There is often a connection between the victim and the perpetrator, however remote. I kept searching for that connection as I probed society’s dirty underbelly …

  The assumption that even killings like these were probably committed by someone the victims knew is, of course, absolutely, totally, and unquestionably false. These killings have the clear signature of a sexual predator, and it is overwhelmingly likely that they were committed by someone who had no connection whatsoever to the victims before the fatal encounter. This mistaken assumption tragically underlies the long, painful years of the investigation. This is one of four points on which Sasser’s investigation is clearly misdirected:

  • Sasser believes, with no evidence, that the killer has remained in Tulsa. When other policemen challenge him on this point, urging him to accept that the guy may have left town, he brushes them aside, saying maybe he’s left town; maybe I’ll catch him tomorrow. In retrospect, it seems likely that the killer left Tulsa shortly after the murder of the third victim.

  • A psychologist, commissioned by a Tulsa newspaper, drew up a profile of the killer in which he suggested that the murderer was a man “probably with no criminal record.” Sasser doesn’t specifically endorse this view, but he fails to show any awareness that this is in error. For a man to emerge as a full-blown serial murderer with no history of criminal behavior would be rare—indeed, I can come up with only two such cases, Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader (BTK). It is far, far more likely that the Tulsa killer had a record of sex crimes, arson, malicious behavior, theft and criminal violence stretching back to the time he was twelve years old.

  • Sasser works the case of the serial murderer, whom he calls Jekyll and Hyde, along with his regular caseload of unsolved homicides, and using essentially the same investigative method. This simply isn’t how you catch a serial murderer. If you’re serious about catching a serial murderer, you establish a task force, dedicated to the job. The task force doesn’t work the victims; they work the criminal population. They look at everybody associated with sex crimes, everybody released from jail about the time the crimes started, every person who assaults another person, and they ask about each one, “Could he be our man?” They identify the leading candidates within the criminal community, and then look for links between the candidates and the crimes.

  Sasser, in Homicide!, describes a world in which he is burrowing toward death, beating his head against a wall trying to catch a particularly reprehensible killer. What the sophisticated reader knows, but Sasser doesn’t, is that the author is beating his head against a wall using an antiquated investigation model utterly inappropriate to the crimes, trying desperately to catch the scent of a killer who has long since left town. Sasser doesn’t know this in 1987, when he is killing himself in his work, and he doesn’t know it in 1990, when he has quit the job and is writing the book. And this, in short, is why research is sometimes as valuable as experience. Experience has taught policemen to look for a killer in the victim’s life. A student of crime would have known that this case was an exception to the rule.

  There is another external level on which this book is also intriguing. Could the Tulsa crimes perhaps be the work of a major undocumented serial murderer? Could they be the work of a known serial murderer, but not previously attributed to him?

  One of Sasser’s victims was found with a pair of black, military-type socks knotted around her n
eck. Based on this, Sasser believes he is looking for a man in his thirties, since

  a) There’s no military base nearby, and

  b) Young people don’t wear those kind of socks.

  The work of John Douglas and Robert Ressler gives us, in the late 1990s, a second reason to believe that the killer was in fact an older man. There’s no panic here, no hasty retreat. The killer took his time raping his victims and mutilating their bodies. He cleaned up afterward, and, in the first two cases, disposed of the bodies carefully, in a place where they would not be found for days afterward. He concealed the bodies in places he had no doubt picked out earlier, and registered as possible dumpsites.

  So if he had done this before, where? The BTK murders were committed in Wichita, mostly in the mid- to late 1970s. It is less than three hours from Wichita to Tulsa; however, the BTK murders and the Tulsa homicides are not very similar, and I think it is quite unlikely that they were connected. Faryion Wardrip, another serial murderer, was then in his early twenties and living in Wichita Falls, Texas, three and a half hours to the south of Tulsa. I doubt that it was him, either, but you never know.

  The third Tulsa homicide is very different from the other two. In the first two Tulsa attacks, the killer abducted women in the middle of the night, took them to an unknown place, and dumped their bodies at secure locations. The third attack was much, much riskier, a young woman murdered in broad daylight while jogging through a park, her body obviously left where she was attacked.

  But that may explain why the killer left Tulsa at that time. The newspapers, after the murder of Susan Oakley, were on the story like paint. The best detective in town—Sasser—was assigned to the case. The risky daylight attack would have left the killer wondering about witnesses and about evidence left behind.

  The Tulsa killer killed young women who were essentially innocent, just attractive young girls who were going about their business. This puts him among a minority of serial murderers, most of whom attack prostitutes. He may have just stopped killing at that point; he may have moved on. Between the two, I’d be inclined to bet on the latter. Since we don’t know who he was, we have to wonder. But Sasser made a career out of trying to find that answer, and it nearly killed him.

  And, while we are in Oklahoma in the 1980s … I have been re-reading Robert Mayer’s The Dreams of Ada, and then reading John Grisham’s The Innocent Man. Each book is about a case in Ada, Oklahoma, in the 1980s in which a young woman was murdered by persons unknown. After some years two young men were arrested, one because somebody said he was involved and the other because he was a friend of the man who was said to be involved. Dragging from the young men quasi-confessions extracted under duress, the police loaded the case with jailhouse snitches, fringe witnesses drawn to the drama of the investigation and half-assed experts with convenient interpretations of the forensic flotsam. They succeeded in convicting the two entirely innocent young men, who then spent years in the Oklahoma prison system, fighting execution.

  Not one case; two cases … the two books deal with different cases, but that is what happened in both cases. Some of the same prosecutors and policemen extracted phony confessions in the two cases, and succeeded in ruining the lives of four young men, two of whom remain in prison as of this writing. An unfortunate use of the power of the law.

  (Ada, if you are wondering, is 120 miles from Tulsa. And yes, the crimes all occurred in the same time frame. Don’t make too much out of that; there are a lot of unidentified murderers out there.)

  Books about cases of injustice inevitably decry the police and prosecutorial misconduct that led to the miscarriage of justice. (By the way, if somebody deliberately causes a miscarriage of justice, shouldn’t that be called an abortion of justice? Just wondering.) In individual cases it is no doubt appropriate to name the names and kick the behinds of the people who caused the system of justice to abort. My point is that we always do this; there is probably no such thing as a book about the prosecution of an innocent person that does not seek someone to hold responsible.

  That creates the impression that the system of justice fails only when the police are sloppy or insensitive, only when the prosecution is overzealous, only when the judge winks and the defense attorney nods. The system of justice fails because human beings must operate it. Human beings lack the sophistication of understanding that would enable us to figure out, in every case, what has actually happened. We’re simply not that smart.

  It is exactly this that causes us to be fascinated with crime cases and detective stories: that we are pushing our understanding beyond its natural limits. In the same way that athletic contests fascinate us because they show us athletes pushing their bodies to and beyond the natural limits of the human form, investigations fascinate us because they show us investigators pushing their minds to and beyond the natural limits of deductive reasoning. By working together for the last 150 years, we have pushed the envelope of criminal investigation inconceivably beyond the intuition with which we began in 1850—and yet this remains profoundly true: we do not have the ability to figure out what happened in every case. Sometimes we will try, and sometimes we will fail.

  I believe that if you think about that, you must accept that this is true. Let me then ask another question: Is it wise to construct a judicial system upon the premise that the pursuit of justice can be perfected? It seems to me that this is what we have done … or, since it goes on, what we are doing. We tinker relentlessly with the machinery of justice—changing the rules of evidence, requiring more discovery or less discovery, admitting this and barring that, requiring that more be done to ensure an adequate defense. Does this not rest upon the assumption that trials can be perfected?

  The real problem is not that trials are imperfect, but that we declare them to be perfect. Upon the word of a jury, we will take a man’s life, sometimes suddenly and more often by the days. If the jury says “not guilty,” we close the door and walk away; the jury has spoken, the fact of innocence is perfect and can never be assailed. If the jury says “guilty” we embark on a painful process to make certain that it was a perfect trial—but if it was, we may feel justified in taking the life of the guilty person. Is this not an assumption that the trial has delivered a perfect outcome?

  Judges and law professors stand within the circle of the law to study and debate the perfection of trials. I am stepping outside the circle of the law to ask a more difficult question: was this a smart idea to begin with? The “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard pushes the system toward the pretense of certainty, rather than allowing it to recognize the reality of doubt. Should we perhaps have started with a different assumption: in many cases we simply do not know what happened.

  In the world of crime and punishment, the greatest enemy of justice is often the certainty that justice has already been delivered. I visualize lawyers and politicians lining up at my doorstep to tell me that the system of justice could not function without finality, that what it needs is not less certainty but more; I can see the line forming out my window as I write. Perhaps. I think not, but serial murderers are awaiting us, and we will save that debate for another day.

  A little before noon on Sunday, June 2, 1985, an Asian man entered a hardware store in South City, California, which is on the southern loop of the San Francisco/Oakland area. He was wearing a parka, in June, which drew the attention of a clerk. The clerk saw the man slip a vise into the folds of the parka. He asked a customer to follow the man, and called the police.

  When the customer followed the shoplifter from the store the man bolted, fleeing the area. A large man with a beard approached the clerk, explaining that his Oriental “friend” was simple-minded, didn’t know any better. He offered to pay for the stolen item.

  A cop arrived, and immediately recognized a familiar scam. Shoplifters not uncommonly work in pairs. When one of them is caught, the partner will spring into action, offering to pay for whatever the simple-minded brother/friend/nephew/jogging partner has carried off. The c
op walked the bearded man to his car, and spotted what he thought was a gun under a seat.

  He ran the plates. The car’s license plates belonged to a different automobile. This gave the police the right to search the car, and take a look at the gun.

  The gun had a silencer attached to it. Silencers are illegal.

  The bearded man was taken into custody. Within minutes of arriving at the police station, the man could be tied to several different missing-persons cases. The license plates were traced to a man who had disappeared, with his entire family, two months before. The vehicle itself belonged to another missing person. The suspect presented identification belonging to a third missing person, and his pockets yielded receipts given to a fourth.

  “Do you want to know who I really am?” asked the bearded man. “I’m Leonard Lake, a fugitive from the Feds.”

  He grabbed a cyanide capsule from under his collar, and swallowed it in a second. He never spoke again, and died some days later.

  The automobile yielded bloodstains, bullet holes, and identification cards belonging to yet another missing person. One of the most grisly crime sprees in American history was beginning to come to light.

  The Asian man who had fled the scene was Charlie Chitat Ng, pronounced “Charlie Cheetah Ing.” Ng is a British citizen of Chinese origin, from a family of some means. He fled to Canada, where he was arrested a month later, again arrested while shoplifting.