Faces of Evil

by Lois Gibson

  I do know this: the things he did were very, very bad.

  The Goynes case, which spanned almost two decades as well as two different states, focused a powerful magnifying glass on many different aspects of the criminal justice system: the meaning of the term criminally insane (and the huge gaps in treatment of those who meet that definition), early good-behavior releases of violent felons, dangerous overcrowding of prisons, concurrent versus consecutive sentencing, the degradation of neighborhoods by the presence of too many halfway houses—and the part that most personally affects me—the uncommon, almost unbelievable courage and will to live demonstrated by crime victims fighting for their lives.

  It is this aspect of the Goynes cases that I will never forget. The women whose lives were devastated by Theodore Goynes (at least, those who lived to tell about it) were average, everyday women. And although they each appeared to possess almost unimaginable strength, courage and endurance, I believe it is these qualities we all have within us that give us that same incredible power: the will to live.

  We never know when that power may be called upon, but please rest assured that it lies within each and every one of us. I believe it was put there by God. I know I found it, deep within myself, when the man I’ve spoken of earlier tried to strangle me to death while raping me. I found out then that I, an innocent girl from Kansas who’d never met a mean person in my life, needed to fight to survive even as he choked the life out of me and somehow I found that will, that strength, that courage.

  As I would come to find out, the women who met up with Theodore Goynes would be sorely tested by his depravity.

  My experience with Theodore Goynes began on February 15, 1989, but for the victims of Goynes, it goes back—way back—to November, 1973. At that time, out on parole, Goynes had already done five years for burglary in the Illinois Department of Corrections and had done two years at Jacksonville Development Center, an Illinois state psychiatric hospital, where he had been treated for “schizophrenic and auditory hallucinations.”

  Psychotropic medications seemed to reduce his symptoms, so when Goynes was released from custody, he was urged to keep taking his medication.

  He did not keep taking his meds.

  A few months later, a twenty-two-year-old woman was sound asleep in her own bed when she was awakened by what sounded like “a scratching” on the back door.

  “And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror,” wrote Poe and no more apt description applies to what Goynes’s first victim heard on a cold November night.

  She got out of bed and crept to the back of the house, to the door where she’d heard the strange noise. Just then, that same door was suddenly smashed open by a man with a sawed-off shotgun and a knife, who forced his way—and her—back into her bedroom. He raped her, then stabbed her multiple times, finally plunging the knife into her throat, where he made a clumsy attempt to sever her carotid artery. He grazed her windpipe instead.

  Then he tied her up on the bed and piled clothing on top of her body. By this time, certain she was going to die, the young woman decided to “play dead” in hopes that he would leave.

  But Goynes wasn’t finished with her yet.

  She caught a whiff of a horrifying odor—lighter fluid.

  “I could hear the can popping as he squeezed it,” she later testified. “As soon as he got through sprinkling it all over the bed, he lit it.”

  As the bed burst into flames, Goynes left.

  With amazing, almost superhuman presence of mind, the woman managed to free her hands from the cord Goynes had used to tie her up. She then pulled the knife out of her own throat and rolled off the bed.

  “I prayed to God, ‘Don’t let me die,’” she said.

  Then, naked, bleeding, her hair on fire, she leapt from a second-floor window to the street and stumbled down the block to get help.

  A few nights later, Goynes struck again, only this time there was no demure scratching at the back door. A twenty-nine-year-old woman was sound asleep in the house she shared with her four children, when the kitchen window was brutally shattered. When she leapt to her feet and rushed down the hall to investigate, she found Goynes in her kitchen, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.

  As he had done with his first victim, Goynes forced the young mother down the hall and into her bedroom, where he raped her while her children—from five to ten years old—slept in the next room. Something about the bedroom light being on seemed to disturb him, because he dragged her down the hall to the darkened living room and raped her again.

  Maybe evil can’t stand light. It thrives on darkness.

  “I’ll be watching the house, bitch,” Goynes told his trembling victim, “and if I see any cops anywhere around, I’ll come back. I’ll kill you and your children.”

  The mortally fearful woman didn’t report the rape for one full day.

  The same day he left the terrified mother shaking in her home in the room next to her sleeping babies, Goynes stalked and raped a third woman in the back room of a record store where she worked, made her perform oral sex and stole $50 from her. Like his first victim, she escaped and ran screaming stark naked down the street until she found help.

  When Theodore Goynes was finally arrested and brought to trial, his attorney mounted an insanity defense. When he was not taking his medication, Goynes, who admitted suffering “black-outs,” forgot such things as his own birthdate, the name of his attorney, the name of the hospital where he was incarcerated or even why he had been arrested in the first place.

  “He’s crazy,” said Goynes’s lawyer.

  But a psychiatrist who examined Goynes mentioned only that, with an IQ of 70, he “has a bad temper and gets into a lot of fights.” The court-appointed shrink declared Goynes “of sound mind” to stand trial.

  Goynes pled guilty to a staggering list of felony charges: rape, burglary, assault with intent to commit murder and arson.

  In 1974, the Illinois judge sentenced Goynes to forty years for each rape, twenty-five years for assault with intent to commit murder, twenty years for arson and twelve years for burglary.

  But the judge set all the sentences to run concurrently—not consecutively. Goynes was given one forty-year term.

  In prison, Goynes took his medications regularly and his hallucinatory symptoms abated. He adjusted well to the routine of prison life and, because of his model-prisoner behavior, got good-time years deducted from his sentence.

  In all, Goynes received something like three years of good time taken off for every one year of his sentence that he served.

  By the time he had served fourteen years in prison, Goynes was adjudged to have served his full sentence—only fourteen years out of forty.

  Subsequently, he was not even paroled—he was released.

  On December 18, 1989, Goynes was set free. He was encouraged to take his medications. Goynes decided he’d had enough of Illinois and wanted to return to his home state of Texas.

  He did not take his meds.

  Four months later, on April 18, 1989, in Houston, Goynes was arrested for burglary. After reviewing his history and the report of a court-appointed psychiatrist who examined him—and reported that Goynes was a “confused adult” who sometimes acted because he heard voices—the judge acquitted Goynes on the burglary charges.

  Not guilty, by reason of insanity.

  Goynes was sent to a mental hospital. He was put back on his medication, which quieted the voices and stopped the hallucinations. This made him a peaceful patient. After a few months, Goynes was once again set free. And once again, he was urged to take his medication.

  He did not take his meds.

  In February of 1989, in Houston, Theodore Goynes—whether from madness or evil, no one knows—went on a violent rampage.

  The late January evening was crisp when forty-one-year-old Jane Carr, who was driving home from work, stopped off at a market along th
e way to pick up a few groceries and a couple of movies for the weekend. As she was loading her bags into the back of her late-model black car, she felt a gun pressed into her back.

  She turned to see two African-American males standing in front of her. One of the men ran away, but the other one—short, wiry, with an angular, angry face and dirty hair, forced her to get into her car. He made her drive to an abandoned house in Houston’s Lake Forest subdivision.

  He seemed to know his way around and, with the gun to her head, forced her to climb into a kitchen window, where he shoved her to the floor and raped her. After that, he pushed her down the hall and into one of the bedrooms, where he raped and sodomized her again.

  “You’ve seen my face,” he told Jane, “and so now I’m going to kill you.”

  He hit her over the head with the gun, then again and again—and then he picked up something else, maybe a brick, and smashed her skull with it. While she fought and struggled, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her. After that, he took a cord and tied her hands and feet.

  Like an earlier Goynes victim, Jane decided that the only way to escape with her life at this point was to play dead. She let herself go limp.

  But Goynes was not to be fooled this time. To make sure she was really dead, he took a tire iron and smashed her in the ribs, breaking eight of them.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t cry out.

  Satisfied that he’d finally killed her, Goynes dragged the bloodied and battered woman’s inert form over to the closet. Inside the closet was a built-in wooden storage bin, just the right size for a woman’s body.

  Grunting with the effort, Goynes stuffed Jane Carr into the wooden bin and closed its heavy lid, like a casket.

  Jane’s skull was fractured in numerous places; she was suffering from multiple stab wounds and her right arm was shattered.

  “But I was determined to live,” this brave, brave woman told investigators later. “I was not going to die in that house.”

  In her cramped little coffin, she worked her hands loose, then pushed up the wooden lid, dragged herself out and began a torturous journey, crawling naked and bleeding from house to house until, at last, she found one good Samaritan, a fifty-five-year-old man who wrapped her gently in a sheet and called for an ambulance and the police.

  The investigating detective was Deputy Chief Charles McClelland, who was, at the time, a sergeant in Sex Crimes. A tall, broad-shouldered African-American with scholarly glasses and a moustache, McClelland is known for his easy smile and warm laughter

  Unlike some of the officers with whom I’ve worked over the years, especially in the beginning, who refused to take me seriously, Chief McClelland has always treated me with respect. He once told a friend of mine that he thinks of me as what he called an adjunct detective.

  He said, “I’ve always used Lois as a valuable resource. Not only is she very talented, she’s unique in the way she deals with traumatized victims, the way she convinces them to talk to her. She has incredible patience. After she’s done with a sketch, I’ll go back and talk to her, ask what type of guy she thinks this is, if she has different ideas about the victim. And usually, she does. She’ll have some kind of information that no one else has been able to get.”

  I was really blown away when I heard that. No forensic sketch artist could ever hope for a finer compliment. I’d worked with Sgt. McClelland before, so I wasn’t surprised when his call came through.

  “Lois,” he said, “I really need your help on this one.” He went on to describe the horrific attack on Jane Carr and I could tell that he was determined to catch this guy.

  “It’s a miracle she’s alive,” he said. “She should have been dead.”

  The victim, a petite and lovely African-American woman, was still recovering at home in the care of her devoted husband. Since the attack had been so savage and her injuries so critical, I went to Jane Carr’s home to do the sketch.

  When I knocked at the door of her ground-floor apartment, juggling easel and art supplies, I was surprised when a 6′8″ man answered. Taking some of the heavier items out of my hands, he held the door wide and led me to his wife, who was curled up on the sofa, covered with bandages and casts. After speaking softly and lovingly to her, he settled down in a big easy chair nearby to watch, his long legs stretching halfway across the floor of the small room.

  By this time, I had a hard and fast rule against anyone sitting in on sketch sessions. But there was something about this man’s demeanor, his quiet concern and the way his wife seemed to take comfort by his mere presence…I just didn’t object.

  All he said, later, was, “During that whole thing, she never lost consciousness.”

  He seemed in awe of her courage and I could see that his love for her made him feel helpless. As we neared the end of the session, I asked him what he did for a living.

  His eyes took on a fierce cast and in a tone deadly in its quiet, said, “I’m a guard in the prison system.”

  I stared into those eyes and in one brief moment of silence, we communed, this grieving husband and I, a wordless dialogue. I knew, without asking, how he ached to get his hands on the man who had done this terrible thing to his wife and I also knew that, if it had been me, I would have felt exactly the same way.

  Mrs. Carr was obviously in a great deal of pain, so I tried to distract her by asking what she did for a living. With a keening wail, she burst into tears.

  “I drove a school bus,” she sobbed. “I loved it. It’s the only job I have ever loved. Now he took that from me. The bones in my arm are so crushed, the doctors don’t think I’ll ever be able to drive again!”

  As she wept, I crossed the room, touched her shoulders and tried to comfort her as best I could. “Maybe you can compensate, when the time comes,” I said softly. “Maybe you can use the other arm more…”

  “No!” she cried. “I have to pass a test to drive a school bus again.”

  She was so inconsolable that I went back to the drawing. Her tall silent husband got to his feet and murmured in her ear, smoothing her hair through the bandages with his big hand, and she slowly got herself back under control.

  When I thought she was able to handle it, I turned the drawing board around to see if she wanted me to make any changes.

  “That’s that tramp!” she cried. “That’s that tramp!”

  She seemed relieved, even jubilant to see the sketch of her assailant. I packed up my gear to go and her husband helped me to carry it out to the car. I noticed he had to duck his head to get through his own door.

  As I stowed my gear in the trunk of the car, he thanked me and said, “She never lost consciousness you know, during that whole thing.”

  My composite sketch was printed up on a Crime Stoppers “City-Wide Alert.”

  Sergeant McClelland was convinced that the man who clearly meant to murder Jane Carr lived in the same neighborhood where the attack had taken place.

  “The scene of the abduction, the scene of the assault and the bayou where police later found the victim’s stolen car are all within a half-mile of each other,” he pointed out. “That indicates to me that he usually travels on foot.” He added, “I’d be willing to bet my badge that he lives there.”

  McClelland threw himself into the investigation with a vengeance, combing “that whole northeast side” of the city for suspects, chasing leads, hauling men in for lineups, questioning suspects, checking out alibis.

  The viciousness of Jane Carr’s attack added another worry. “He’s a threat to that area,” said McClelland, “and I have no doubt that the next time, he’ll make sure his victim is dead.”

  And although Charles McClelland did everything in his power to keep that from happening, Theodore Goynes slipped through the dragnet once again.

  Another woman, though she fought as hard as the others, was not as lucky.

  It was the weekend of her birthday and Angelica Jackson had a special lunch date with her husband that Saturday to
celebrate. But the children, two boys, aged five and one, wanted a party, so the family was planning a little to-do on Sunday for family and a few friends.

  Angelica worked as a clerk at a drug store in a little strip mall on Mesa and after work, she stopped off at the market to pick up the birthday cake her husband had ordered for the next day’s party.

  The market was just down the street from where Jane Carr had been abducted nine months before. And Angelica drove almost the exact same model and color of car that Jane Carr had driven.

  As Angelica leaned over to put the cake in the back seat of the car, a man whom witnesses had seen “loitering” in the parking lot earlier suddenly appeared and tried to force her into the car. Angelica was a tall, athletic beauty and she fought hard with the man—so much so that two women clerks inside the store heard her screams and saw the struggle going on outside. They ran outside to see if they could help.

  The horrified witnesses watched as the man pointed a gun at Angelica and shoved her into the car. Determined to do something, the two women piled into a car and followed the woman and her abductor as Angelica’s car sped out of the parking lot.

  Sadly, the suspect was able to elude the two women and they rushed back to the grocery to call police.

  From what police were later able to piece together, Theodore Goynes had his routine down-pat and true to form, he forced Angelica to drive to an abandoned apartment complex where, most likely, he intended to do pretty much the same things to her that he had done to his other victims, both eighteen years before in Illinois and more recently in Houston.

  But Angelica was a fighter and when he started to push her up the stairs of the empty apartments, she twisted loose from his grip and ran for her life.

  He shot her in the back of the head.

  When a wrecker reported coming across her abandoned car some hours later, officers responded by searching the nearby empty complex, where they found Angelica Jackson slumped onto an outside stairwell.

  Her birthday cake still rested on the backseat of the car.

  She died tragically as her birthday dawned, leaving two children motherless, a widowed father shattered and a grieving mother-in-law obsessed with changing the flawed criminal justice system that had turned a monster like Theodore Goynes loose.