The Rainy Day Killer

by Michael J. McCann

  He waved a hand at the body on the cot. “Here’s my contribution to your stats, Hank. By all means, step up the patrols of vacant buildings now, because you’ll really want to find your primary crime scene, as they call it on TV. I may stay here, but then again, I may not. I scouted out a number of different spots, so I have some options. Something else for you to think about. And think about. And think about.”

  He folded his hands in his lap again. “I have to get moving, because there’s still lots to do and she’ll be stiffening up soon, but let me leave you with a couple of thoughts. First of all, she was great. She screamed and yelled and begged and moaned the whole weekend. I love it. That’s why you won’t find any signs of gagging, because I let them talk away.” He waved a hand. “Who could hear, around this place? Second, we explored some things sexually I hadn’t been able to try before, for one reason or another that I won’t get into now, and she was wonderful. I came so hard I thought I’d see stars.

  “The key word here, Hank, is lust. Ask Father Ed what it means in terms of my profile, will you? It’ll be so helpful.” His laugh was low, chilling. “He’s such a great guy. Have you attended any of his courses or presentations before? I have. He’s a great speaker. He explains things so simply. Lust murderers, organized and disorganized, nonsocial and social. All that bullshit. It just rolls off his tongue. He’s so smooth. But honestly, Hank, these guys couldn’t find their own ass in the dark with both hands. And neither can you, because I don’t intend to leave you any physical evidence. Gasp! But anyway, don’t mind me. I only work here.”

  He stood up and held out his hand, which gripped a wireless remote control device.

  “Come and get me, you idiot.”

  The screen went blank.

  12

  Saturday, April 27: late morning

  “He’s intelligent,” Griffin said, leaning back in his chair, his knee propped up on the edge of the table. “Not as smart as he’d like you to believe, but smart enough. Studies have shown that 80 percent of serial murderers have an average or higher than average intelligence, and he certainly falls into that category.”

  “He said to ask you about lust and what it means in terms of his profile,” Horvath said. “I don’t know a whole lot about behavioral profiling. What are we supposed to understand, here?”

  Griffin shrugged. “It’s another game he likes to play. He’s trying to use our own tools against us to confuse things and have a little fun. If you want, I can go over some of the basic stuff first, to get it out of the way.”

  “Feel free,” Hank invited.

  “Lust murder is a term that goes way back,” Griffin said to Horvath. “Different analysts have different preferences when it comes to terminology, never mind the concepts themselves. Even the pioneers in the field like Hazelwood and Douglas have fundamental disagreements on a lot of this stuff. Here’s my take.”

  He lowered his knee and folded his hands on the table in front of him. “I prefer to use the term sexual homicide when it comes to guys like this, because in its simplest terms it means we’re dealing with a crime where the sexual element is the primary reason why it happens. It drives the whole thing, it determines the various acts committed during the period of captivity and rape, and it climaxes, pun intended, with the murder.”

  “So as we put together the sequence of events,” Horvath said, “to figure out what he did, step by step, we need to ask ourselves why each thing was important to him in terms of sexual gratification?”

  “You won’t need to get quite that fancy,” Griffin said. “You can just come right out and call a spade a spade. This is a sexual homicide. Let me explain.” He gestured at the blank television screen. “He mentioned organized and disorganized, social and nonsocial. Suffice it to say, this guy is what’s commonly called an organized offender. Despite all his playing around, there are definite characteristics that let us make this basic assumption.” He held up a hand to tick off the points on his finger. “He’s fairly smart, where disorganized offenders are usually less so. He’s socially adept, because he can talk his victims into his trap, where a disorganized offender usually has to use a blitz attack to subdue them. He’s sexually competent, whereas disorganized killers usually act out of sexual frustration or confusion. He has pretty good control over his emotions during the rape and murder, instead of being all over the map in his behavior. He follows himself in the media closely, where a disorganized offender either wouldn’t bother or would be too upset.”

  He switched hands and continued to count off the points. “He plans ahead, controls the event, is comfortable hunting anywhere, targets strangers, uses restraints and requires a submissive victim, where disorganized offenders usually grab a victim on impulse, improvise as they go along, may act against someone they already know within a geographical comfort zone, and blitz in a sudden attack that makes restraints an afterthought. Our UNSUB’s not afraid of personalizing the victim, where a disorganized offender often depersonalizes or dehumanizes them.”

  “Where does the torture come in?” Karen asked, her voice flat.

  “The asphyxiation routine is not uncommon with organized offenders,” Griffin replied. “They use the ligature to strangle the victim to the point of unconsciousness for their own arousal. It’s a control thing, and I expect the rapes occur at this point.”

  “Which fits with what you said about wanting passive victims,” Horvath said.

  “Yes. The mutilation, though, is something else. It doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the picture.” Griffin leaned back. “Let me explain by talking first about sexual substitution. Insertion of a foreign object is something you often see with a disorganized offender, a stick or screwdriver or some other phallic object that compensates for the offender’s own inability to penetrate his victim. There’s never been any indication of this with the Rainy Day Killer, as far back as we can go.” Griffin waved at the television. “You could see the arrogance about his sexual prowess and, as far as I’m concerned, that rings true. So it doesn’t surprise me there’s no use of foreign objects because their absence is consistent with his type, if I can use a negative to prove a positive. See what I mean? There’s a certain consistency.

  “Mutilation, now, is often seen as a form of depersonalization. Either the offender wants to hide the identity of the victim, thinking maybe it’ll hinder the investigation, or he wants to desexualize or dehumanize the body. There are different conclusions that might be drawn from this, including regret and a wish to deny that he’s just killed a human being, misogyny and a feeling of contempt, resentment or hatred of the female body and a desire to androgynize his victims and rob them of their sexuality. You could go on, but the point here is that you’re much more likely to see this kind of behavior with a disorganized offender, which this guy clearly is not. So there’s an inconsistency here.”

  “So why does he do it?” Horvath asked.

  “Why, indeed.” Griffin glanced at Hank. “This is the first time he’s talked about it specifically in one of his videos. ‘Why, oh why.’ I’m thinking maybe he’s getting a little bored with it. In the first case linked to this UNSUB, in St. Louis, there was mutilation of the breasts and the genitals, and they never turned up. In the second case, in Evansville, there was mutilation of the breasts only, and he sent them to the investigating officer, his pattern ever since. Looking back, I think he may have been experimenting in the first one. Maybe he wanted to try cannibalism because he’d read about it and thought it’d make him appear that much more horrible.”

  “And didn’t like it,” Horvath said.

  “And didn’t get the kick out of it he thought he would. But he’d already included it as part of what he was viewing as his signature, so the next time, he skipped the genitals, skipped whatever he did with the breasts the first time, and just sent them to the police instead.”

  “What the fuck’s the point?” Karen demanded.

  Griffin nodded. “That’s the five-dollar question. As far as I’
m concerned, there’s no sexual component. They’re removed post-mortem, and it’s pretty evident he doesn’t engage in sexual activity with his victims after they’re dead. It’s not depersonalization, because he wants their identity known and he likes to brag about how they performed sexually for him. I think it’s strictly for shock effect. He lives for the fear factor. He wants to get inside the investigator’s head and freak the hell out of him. Plus, it inevitably ends up in the news, and it upsets the public. That’s the other thing that’s so important to this guy. He wants the community to be afraid of him. It’s part of his power-and-control thing.”

  “He’s a fucking inhuman monster.”

  “Yes,” Griffin said. “That’s exactly what he wants everyone to think.”

  13

  Saturday, April 27: afternoon

  Hank ordered in lunch, after which they watched the other videos the Rainy Day Killer had sent to law enforcement in previous cities. Griffin had made copies of the case files, and he gave them a brief overview of each one before playing the corresponding video.

  “The first one we know of occurred in St. Louis in October 2006,” Griffin said. “The victim was Pearl Mortenson, a twenty-one-year-old prostitute and drug addict. She was the first in the basic victim profile—white, small, reasonably fit, blonde hair. She disappeared during a rainstorm in the middle of a Friday afternoon from a street corner on Jefferson Avenue in south St. Louis. He held her for four days, raped and tortured her multiple times using ligature strangulation, and left her along the river pretty much the same way he did here. This was his first video.”

  It was longer than the Olsen video, rambling and melodramatic, and shot with different equipment that obviously didn’t include a remote device. He moved back and forth several times between his chair and the camera, at one point removing the camera from its stand and carrying it over to the body, all the while narrating as though he were filming a documentary. The movement gave them a look at his body, and it more or less matched the description given to them by Esther Banks of a slightly-built man who was not very tall. Griffin remarked that he likely wasn’t a very strong individual, which would explain the use of the stun gun, drugs, physical restraints, and the hand truck when disposing of the body.

  Karen asked if he thought the killer might have some kind of disability or condition that resulted in abnormal weakness. Griffin thought it was probably not the case; it was more likely he simply wasn’t a very strong man, his sexual prowess notwithstanding. He likely spent most of his time in sedentary activities, such as sitting in front of a computer. If he worked, it was likely at a job that didn’t involve manual labor.

  In this first video, the Rainy Day Killer had already mutilated the body. He spent several minutes describing what he’d done, holding up a bloodstained KA-BAR combat knife with which he’d removed the breasts and genitalia. He went on to describe the erotic strangulation and compared himself to the Dating Game Killer, who had been active in California in the late 1970s, then invited the investigating officer, Detective Len Capers, to call him the Rainy Day Killer. He described where he’d leave the body now that he was finished with it, and explained he was bringing her to the river to let her soul cross the Styx to the afterworld.

  “You could see he was in a warehouse,” Griffin said, ejecting the DVD and loading the next one. “They were never able to find it. Capers suppressed a lot of information, including the Rainy Day Killer nickname and the mutilation. The case went cold. They were handling a rash of sexual homicides at that time and had their hands full. I’ve looked at some of them and I think our UNSUB was responsible for at least three, possibly five, between 2002 and 2006, in which he was experimenting with different victims and different MOs. Personally, I think he had a near-miss on one of the other ones and left the city before they got any closer to him.”

  The second video had been sent to Lieutenant Jim Feeley of the Evansville, Indiana police department. The victim was Jane Anne Meecher, twenty-four, a convenience store clerk who was abducted on a rainy Saturday afternoon in June 2007 after finishing her shift. Again, she was white, single, slightly over five feet tall, one hundred and nine pounds, and her medium-length hair was blonde. He held her for three days before she died on him, which he complained about bitterly in the video before removing her breasts with the KA-BAR while the camera recorded it.

  He explained his intention to leave the body on the banks of the Ohio River as a human sacrifice to the spirits of the Angel Mound builders. Angel Mound, Griffin explained, was a Native American historical site eight miles from Evansville. Feeley spent a lot of time investigating this angle, and for some time worked on the theory that the killer was Native American.

  “By the time he’d decided that the human sacrifice bit was bullshit,” Griffin said, “the case had grown cold.”

  Because Capers had held back the nickname and the mutilation in the Mortenson homicide, Feeley didn’t connect his case to St. Louis. Additionally, Feeley made the same decision, hoping that the suppression of this information would help weed out false confessions and dead-end tips. Unfortunately, he made no progress before the Rainy Day Killer struck again, walking onto the campus of the University of Evansville on a wet afternoon in April 2008, where he abducted nineteen-year-old Jackie Pilcher, a sophomore majoring in business administration.

  The video he sent to Feeley this time was shorter and more to the point. He reminded Feeley that he wanted to be publicly known as the Rainy Day Killer, he pointed out the similarities between Pilcher and Meecher so that his modus operandi would be clearly understood, even by a moron like Feeley, and he explained he was dumping Pilcher on the riverbank close to the riverboat casino to apologize to the water spirits for the defamation caused by the presence of such a hollow temple of materialism and greed.

  “This time,” Griffin said as the video ended, “Lieutenant Feeley told the press he believed the two homicides had been committed by the same person, but again he didn’t use the nickname. Like many of us, he didn’t appreciate the way these individuals become popularized in the media. However, the UNSUB finally figured out it would be simpler just to go to the press himself, so he called a reporter with the local newspaper and gave him the works, including the fact that he was responsible for other rapes in the area but that the Meecher and Pilcher murders were what he liked to think of as his signature kills.”

  “He really wanted the publicity,” Horvath said as Griffin changed DVDs again.

  “It’s the fear factor,” Griffin agreed, sitting down and picking up the remote control. “Evansville’s not that big a place, just over a hundred thousand people. The publicity forced the local authorities to step up their investigation, and once again it got a little hot for this guy and he left town. Just over a year later, another victim turned up in Louisville. This time, things were a little different.”

  The fourth video was addressed to Lieutenant Cindy Kowpacki, the lead investigator with the Louisville police department. The victim’s name was Sarah Towson, and at age twenty eight she was the oldest so far. She was married, where the previous victims had been single, and she was a real estate lawyer, where the others had worked at lower-income jobs. Most noticeably, instead of approaching her on the street, he abducted her from the front porch of her ground-floor apartment in the trendy Belgravia district on a Sunday morning in June.

  The quality of the video was higher than the other three and included the use of a remote control device for the first time. The UNSUB had upgraded his equipment upon arrival in Louisville. The routine was similar to what they’d seen in the Olsen video.

  “This is the first time he explains his pretext on camera,” Griffin said.

  Hank watched as the man leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands between his knees, his face still hidden in shadow.

  “It was easy, Cindy. Can I call you Cindy? It gives me a bit of a tingle when I do. Anyway, it was very easy. I knew her husband played basketball every Sunday morning with a b
unch of buddies downtown. I rang her doorbell and told her Frank had just been in a horrible car accident only a few blocks away. They were still trying to get him out, and he was calling for her. I told her I witnessed the accident and volunteered to come and get her. I was on my way to church, but this was much more important. She wasn’t any brighter than the others, Cindy. She fell for it right away.”

  He leaned back. “Why am I telling you this? Maybe it’s because I think females are stupid. They’re dumb and trusting. Some guy they’ve never met before in their miserable little lives is completely believable because he’s wearing a nice suit and carrying an umbrella to protect them from the rain in their moment of need. But what about you, my dear, sweet Cindy? Are you dumb too, like the rest of them? Or do you think you can catch me? Just the thought of it gives me such a rush. Being hunted by a woman. You have no idea how arousing that is.”

  Karen grunted something under her breath.

  “I’m going to leave her on the riverbank, Cindy,” the killer went on. “Another soul commended to the Ohio. Were you paying attention when I said I’d done this before? I’ll give you a little tip, sweetheart. There’s no big spiritual meaning to it. It’s not a signature thing. Do you know what that means? Look it up if you don’t.”