Faces of Evil

by Lois Gibson

  What happened next differs depending upon whom you believe, but at trial, a jury, mesmerized in horror, watched an eighteen-minute videotaped confession of Robert Lambert, who, in a guttural voice, stated that he and Hain had decided that the young couple needed to die because, “they saw our faces.”

  Lambert claimed that he took a bolt-cutter and snapped in two the fuel-line to the car, then walked back and said to Hain, “I can’t do it.”

  On the video at this time, Lambert burst into tears and cried, “Scott lit it up! The car blew up.”

  As the vehicle became engulfed in flames, the couple in the trunk began to scream, kicking and beating on the inside of the trunk, howling for help like banshee ghosts straight from the bowels of hell.

  Sobbing, Lambert swore that when he heard the screams, he tried to put out the flames with a blanket, “but I couldn’t.”

  He seemed to recover fairly quickly, however. The two men climbed into Randy’s truck and drove off to have a few beers with a buddy.

  Whether Lambert or Hain set the fire is still unclear, but medical examiners confirmed one part of his sickening story: the victims died with a great deal of smoke in their lungs, indicating they were still breathing when they burned alive.

  Although dogged Tulsa PD investigators closed in on Hain and Lambert within three days of the terrible burning deaths of Randy Young and Debra Mitchell and arrested them, it was a traveling salesman who made the connection between these two suspects and the unsolved rapes up in Wichita, Kansas.

  By this time, it had been three weeks since I’d traveled to Kansas and done the composite drawings, but the detectives there had not given up on those victims. My sketches were still being published in the newspapers, on the Crime Stoppers’ wanted poster. The $13,000 reward was still being offered and the poster, which described the suspects beneath their composites, ended with the chilling words: THEY ARE ARMED AND CONSIDERED DANGEROUS.

  Then, a man from Wichita, on a business trip to Tulsa, sat down to a fast-food breakfast and glanced at the morning paper. Pictured on the front page were Scott Hain and Robert Lambert, who had been arrested the day before.

  His mouth agape, the man stared at the paper. He was convinced that these were the same two men he’d seen on the Crime Stoppers Wanted poster. He couldn’t check right away because his wife had copies of the composite drawings at home, so he just tore out the photographs from the Tulsa paper and took them home with him.

  As soon as possible, the couple called Wichita detectives, who came to their home and collected the newspaper photographs the man had brought from Tulsa. Within the week, detectives drove down to Tulsa with three of the four rape victims and a deputy district attorney. With help from Tulsa authorities, they staged separate lineups for Hain and Lambert.

  All three victims positively identified the men as their attackers.

  Soon after the announcement, the NBC affiliate in Wichita asked if I would give an interview by what’s known as a “live remote,” meaning I would be interviewed by Wichita newscasters, but I would be giving the interview from an NBC affiliate in Houston.

  I agreed and, once I was settled in front of the camera, the news anchor from Wichita asked if I was glad the serial rapists/murderers had been caught.

  “Of course I’m glad they’re in jail, for the survivors’ sake,” I said. “Most of all, I’m glad for the women who helped me. Wichita owes them a debt of gratitude. They cried with me and relived their ordeal and they gave me the images that enabled me to do the sketches that helped police track them down.”

  At this point, I directed my remarks, not at the absentee newscasters, but toward the victims, the survivors, the women with whom I had cried. I knew they would be watching.

  “I know you suffered through it, girls,” I said. “But it worked! They’re in custody now. Tomorrow, you can get up and watch a sunrise and know that those two will never see a sunrise or sunset for the rest of their lives.”

  My voice broke a little then, but I added, “I’m just thankful to all of you.”

  Both Robert Wayne Lambert and Scott Allen Hain, who was tried as an adult, were given the death penalty by the state of Oklahoma.

  In the formal sentencing on June 6, 1988, Judge Donald Thompson ordered Scott Allen Hain—whose sentencing testimony had revealed him to be the more savage and heinous of the two men—to be sentenced to “…death by lethal injection; if lethal injection is held unconstitutional, death is to be by electrocution; and if electrocution is held unconstitutional, death is to be by firing squad…”

  One way or the other, that judge wanted to see those guys dead.

  As for my part in it all, well, all I had wanted in the beginning was a free plane ticket home, but what I got along with it was a powerful lesson in how bad can turn to evil and how sometimes it can seem as if dying would be almost better than surviving a head-on collision with the devil.

  Some of my cop friends have used words like “clairvoyant” and “psychic” to describe how I do my job, but, really, all it takes is a powerful intuition and a strong sensitivity to human nature based, in part, on my own experiences.

  Those qualities, combined with a keen ability and willingness to listen, sometimes enable me to “see” things before they happen. Not a vision or anything like that, mind you, but I guess you could call it more like a premonition, which is what happened to me on the plane flight back to Texas.

  Through the years, whenever I come across some factual, scientific validation of the kinds of things I’ve always known instinctively, I find it very gratifying. Like how some bad guys aren’t content to be just garden-variety bad. They’ve got to keep going until they cross the line into pure evil.

  As he explains in his landmark book, Signature Killers: Interpreting the Calling Cards of the Serial Murderer (Pocket Books, 1997), Dr. Robert Keppel spent more than twenty years investigating and studying the crimes of some of the most infamous serial killers of our time, and interviewed extensively such hall-of-shamers as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Dr. Keppel described a pattern (in sometimes gruesome detail) of how certain vicious criminals escalate the violence of their crimes, seeming to grow more bloodthirsty with each crime they commit.

  An example would be a peeping tom who “graduates” from peering into windows of single women to eventually breaking into their homes and stealing mementos like underwear, to raping his victims, to more serious attacks such as aggravated sexual assault and, finally, committing sexual homicide. If he gets away with his first murder, he will use the “lessons” he learned from that one to commit another and continue as long as he’s able to outwit his law enforcement pursuers. The “Green River Killer,” for instance, murdered dozens of women over two decades before finally being arrested.

  With each crime committed, the serial offender develops a certain pattern or “signature” that can enable the astute investigator to recognize similar signatures in other crimes and thereby narrow the focus of the investigation by linking the crimes and searching for a single suspect or pair of suspects, rather than assuming that the crimes are unrelated. With Hain and Lambert, it was the use of a claw hammer to smash the heads of each of their victims.

  Sex crime investigators, especially, learn to look for these signatures, because rapists who are not apprehended seldom commit only one rape. As my friend, Sergeant Rusty Gallier, once pointed out to me, nothing distresses an investigator more than interviewing the second, third or fourth victim of a rapist he or she has not yet been able to catch.

  “The way I look at it,” he said, “I feel like it’s my fault. Like I didn’t do my job. If I’d caught the guy after the first attack, he wouldn’t have been free to assault anyone else.” He related the pressure that can put investigators under, “a stress,” he said, “that I didn’t even know I had until I transferred to another division.”

  But if investigators are stressed by the fact that a rapist is continuing to rape and they can’t stop him, it’s even more devastating
when the violence of each sexual assault begins to escalate. They know that, in most cases, if the violence continues to worsen, then they will eventually be dealing with at least one homicide. Unless, of course, they can catch him before it comes to that.

  When Captain Dotson called me that fall day in September, Wichita investigators were already seeing this pattern of escalating violence, particularly in the case of the young woman who was gutted.

  If killers’ first attempts at escalating the violence of their crimes are not as satisfactory as they’d hoped, these sociopaths will use the experience as “practice” and try again. Dr. Keppel calls this a “vicious psychodrama.”

  Hain and Lambert, who tried assaulting one woman in her home and wound up facing attacking dogs, settled on their routine of following waitresses home from work and attacking them along the way.

  Yet what even the fine Wichita detectives couldn’t have imagined during those dark days was the fact that some of the more craven signature killers will up the ante of the challenge… meaning they’ll go for more than one victim at a time, deriving a kind of sick pleasure from watching the terror of one victim while another is being tortured, something Keppel calls “depraved.”

  This is, of course, what Hain and Lambert did in Tulsa when they attacked the young couple asleep in their bed.

  Once they’ve experienced success in one kill zone, chances are the killer or killers will return to what Dr. Keppel calls favorite little spots, with which they are not only comfortable and familiar, but where they can also be reasonably certain that they will not be interrupted. This is why the two killers chose to take Randy Young and Debra Mitchell back to Sapulpa, where they had first taken Terry Martin and where Lambert felt comfortable.

  You don’t really have to be “psychic” to figure out for yourself all the things criminalists have been researching through the years. All it takes is common sense and a deep understanding of what makes up the human psyche, both good and evil.

  The Kansas case presented a real challenge for me—coaxing a traumatized witness to recall for me the faces of her attackers when she didn’t even want to admit she’d been attacked.

  But I would soon find myself embroiled in a case that was far more challenging, because it would have to answer the question: How do you do a witness sketch from a victim who is blind?

  Chapter Seven:

  Blind Justice or “Would you please just throw that sketch in the trash?”

  Terror can come in many colors.

  For poor Betsy up in Kansas, it was the hot pink of hives her face broke into just at the memory of the faces of the men who attacked her. For police officer Paula Franks, it was the misty gray of a drizzle that shorted out the wire she was using to call for back-up when a serial rapist attacked her during a sting operation in Memorial Park. For me, it was the pasty-white complexion of the man who tried to kill me.

  For the traumatized family and friends of Maria Santos, terror showed itself in ugly, brassy orange.

  But for Maria herself, terror was the same color as the rest of her world: solid black.

  I can look back now, through the long lens of time, and see things not just as they were, but as they should have been. I know, now, that Maria’s hair is normally lustrous and long, the color of mahogany, and it tumbles down her back and around her plain, honest, sweet face.

  But on the first day we met, Maria’s hair had been chopped off shaggy and short and dyed to a color not seen in nature—not because some unscrupulous hairdresser had figured the blind woman would never notice, but because her terrified family was trying to protect her from a monster who had threatened to return and hurt her all over again.

  Maria—small of stature, gentle and six and one-half months pregnant—had planned to take the bus to a pharmacy to get a prescription filled on August 4, 1988. Maria often used certain methods to navigate her way, such as identifying surrounding aromas and sounds for a given area, counting steps from one place to another and occasionally accepting the kind help of strangers.

  When she crossed the busy boulevard that stood between her apartment complex and the bus stop, for instance, one young fellow assisted Maria across the street and while she awaited the bus another man struck up a conversation with her. He said his name was Julio.

  While she sat on the bus, Julio continued to talk to her and he offered to help her get to the pharmacy. But when Maria lumbered to the front of the bus and asked the driver if this was Hammerly Boulevard, Julio spoke up and claimed that no, it wasn’t. The bus driver yelled out, “It is too Hammerly! What’s wrong with you?”

  This was her stop, so Maria got off the bus, extended her cane and began tap-tapping her way down the sidewalk. Soon she heard the same man at her elbow and before she could say anything, he had grabbed her arm and said, “The pharmacy’s right down here.”

  Maria felt an instant sense of uneasiness. There was something about this strange man’s urgency to “help” her and his firm grasp on her arm was frightening to her. She’d lost count of her steps by this time and didn’t like feeling at his mercy.

  It’ll be all right, she told herself. Once we get to the drugstore, I can wait until he’s gone before I leave.

  But something wasn’t right. For one thing, Maria could now smell the aromas given off by restaurants and she knew there weren’t any restaurants near the drugstore. Then, she felt the pavement underneath her feet change in texture and she knew something was very wrong.

  They weren’t going to the pharmacy. In fact, Maria could tell from the sounds that they were walking up to what was most likely an apartment building.

  She intended to pull away, to say something, but before she had a chance, the man called “Julio” had opened a door and hurled her into a room that she immediately sensed was vacant.

  Grabbing her by the wrists, he dragged her face-down across the floor on her pregnant stomach, but when she tried to scream, he twisted her close to his face, put a knife to her throat and, in Spanish, snarled, “You make one sound or say one word and I will take this knife and plunge it into your stomach. I will kill your baby AND you, understand?”

  He ordered her to take off her clothes and when she hesitated, he yanked the cane out of her hand and began slashing her over the head with it. Then he pressed his hand against her stomach and threatened to jump on her abdomen “with both feet” if she did not comply.

  Shaking, crying, trying to curl her small body around the baby within, she submitted to a brutal rape. All the while, “Julio” kept sneering to her that, because she could not see his face, he could do whatever he wanted to her and no one would ever be able to catch him.

  When the man had finished, he said, “When you’re not pregnant anymore…I’ll come back.”

  But before he left, he pulled his belt out of his pants, wrapped it around her throat and choked her into unconsciousness.

  I’m sure this vicious, evil man walked away from that empty apartment convinced he had committed the perfect crime on the perfect victim—someone who could not recognize him.

  But one big thing he failed to factor into his wicked equation was then-Sergeant (now Lieutenant) Manuel “Manny” Zamora who, at the time, worked sex crimes. Manny Zamora has always been one of my favorite detectives. A tall, handsome Latino man with long, sensitive fingers, Zamora is gentle, with a very soft, bilingual speaking manner. I never knew an investigator who worked harder to find justice for his complainants.

  “When I first interviewed Mrs. Santos and heard what had happened to her,” Zamora said later, “It sent chills down my spine. I’d never seen anything like this before.”

  He made up his mind, then and there, that he would not rest until he had caught this creep and put him behind bars. And to do that, he would use every resource he could find. In 1988, for instance, DNA evidence had never been used successfully in a Houston court of law, but Manny Zamora changed that with this case.

  He took one more unorthodox step—he called me.

&
nbsp; By this time, I had attended the FBI course in forensic art and could claim enough successes with my composites that I was being called upon on an almost fulltime basis by law enforcement officers in the entire Harris County area and surrounding counties. So it was not all that unusual that Lt. Zamora would call me; in fact, I had worked with him many times before. What was different—really different—about this case was that the victim was blind.

  Lt. Zamora was not deterred. After all, many of his victims in sex crimes did not see their assailants. Either they were attacked from behind or they were blindfolded or their attackers wore ski masks, pillowcases or some other disguise. But he didn’t give up on those victims and he was surely not about to give up on Maria Santos.

  “Conducting an investigation,” he said later, “is like working a jigsaw puzzle. Every little bit of evidence is like another piece of the puzzle. You put them all together and soon, a picture emerges.”

  The first thing he did was go back to the place where it had all started—the bus stop.

  “People are creatures of habit,” he said. “They’re going to do pretty much the same thing every day or, at least, on the same day of each week.” He figured he would hang out at the bus stop at pretty much the same time of day Maria had taken the bus and speak to people who, most likely, had also ridden the bus that day, as well as other people who lived and worked in the area.

  Most people, he knew, go by what they see. A pregnant blind woman making her way alone was likely to attract at least some attention and he depended upon human nature to be reliable. People would have noticed her and they could tell him what they’d seen.

  “They acted as her eyes,” he explained. He managed to track down the young Asian man who had helped Maria cross the street. He also found people who had noticed the man called “Julio” talking to Maria.

  When Manny interviewed the bus driver, a tall African-American woman, he learned that she had not only noticed this man “Julio” shadowing the blind woman, but that she had overheard their conversation on the bus. Even though the man had only ridden the bus for one-quarter of a mile, there was something about his manner that had disturbed the bus driver. For one thing, he was noticeably intoxicated in the middle of the day. For another, he had told Maria that they weren’t stopping on Hammerly Boulevard, when they were. Furthermore, he kept grabbing Maria’s arm.