This was different. Not only did we have a name at the outset, but the higher-ups at the FBI were the ones requesting our involvement. Unlike all of the requests that had come from local agencies, this was the first case to come from Bureau headquarters itself, important enough that they were willing to take a chance on our still-experimental approach. It was the kind of request that could put us on the map if we were successful. And it was a personal challenge to me to see if we could reverse engineer our analytical process to get our man; and then, if we did, whether we had the goods to properly charge him and bring him to justice.
I CALLED OVER TO THE ACADEMY MOTOR POOL AND ASKED IF THEY HAD A CAR I could have for the afternoon; otherwise I’d have to drive my own car and submit for mileage reimbursement. With all my traveling, I had to fill out enough expense reports as it was, so I’d just as soon not have to do another. The pool did have one available to me, so I hiked over to the garage and signed out one of the standard Bureau Ford sedans. I drove down the winding road that takes you through the marine base that was our landlord, and out onto 95 North. In those days, back in the eighties, it wasn’t yet the extended parking lot it’s since become at most times of the day, and you could get from Quantico to downtown Washington in less than an hour.
As I drove, I thought of the assignment ahead. This Franklin case, if he turned out to be good for all or most of the crimes he was suspected of, would be on a different order of magnitude than anything we’d worked on to date, both in terms of stakes and public danger. Franklin was operating from a distance against individuals with whom he had no relationship, whom he’d never even met. He was not emotionally involved or personally invested with his victims, factors that were usually important clues for us. And he was highly mobile—he could be anywhere.
Though Dave had given me only the bare outlines of the Franklin story, I knew what was on the line for our unit. Because the profiling program was young and still relatively unproven, this could go a few different ways—most of them bad. While I’d been full-time profiling since January, the BSU didn’t have much of a track record within the FBI yet. High-profile cases such as the Atlanta child murders, San Francisco’s Trailside Killer, and the brutal murder of Bronx special ed teacher Francine Elveson would come into our orbit within the next year, but in the fall of 1980, the profiling program was still very much an open-ended experiment in search of validation through a larger proof of concept within the Bureau.
We’d had positive results with the cases we got from local police departments or sheriff’s offices. In addition, there had been a couple of dramatic successes that had gotten the law enforcement community’s attention in the form of what we called 62-D classifications: Domestic Police Cooperation. It meant that even though the FBI didn’t have primary jurisdiction in the case, the Bureau might possess some investigative tool or test that could be helpful to a local police agency. Such requests would be handled through the closest field office and were supposed to be channeled through headquarters. More often, it seemed, the special agent in charge of the field office (we call them SACs, with each letter pronounced, “S.A.C.,” as opposed to assistant special agents in charge, whom we refer to as ASACs, pronounced “A-sack”) would say something like, “Screw headquarters. I want to talk to you.” SACs are pretty high up on the Bureau food chain, so they usually got their way. Eventually, each field office would assign a profile coordinator, but that hadn’t happened yet.
In December 1979, I got a call from Special Agent Robert Leary of the Rome, Georgia, resident agency. Resident agencies are smaller FBI installations in areas not large enough for a field office. They generally work in concert with the nearest field office. Several days before, a pretty and outgoing twelve-year-old girl named Mary Frances Stoner, a drum majorette in her school’s marching band, disappeared just after being let off the school bus at the end of her driveway, which led a hundred yards to her home in nearby Adairsville, in the northwest corner of the state. Her body had been found in the woods, about ten miles away and just over the county line, by a young couple who noticed a yellow coat lying on the ground and went over to investigate. When they saw what was underneath the coat, they contacted police, who came immediately and processed the scene. The medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault, manual strangulation from the rear, and blunt force trauma to the head. There was a bloodstained rock near the body that the police took as evidence.
After reviewing the case file, crime scene photographs, and autopsy protocols, and studying the victimology, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what had happened, and why this low-risk victim in a low-risk setting had been the subject of such a horrific offense.
I gave the police my profile of the UNSUB over the phone, which included an age range of mid- to late twenties; blue-collar occupation, perhaps an electrician or plumber; a military record with a dishonorable or medical discharge; average to above average intelligence but high school education at most; previous sexual assaults, though probably not any murders; probably married because he fancied himself to be a stud, but the marriage would be either dysfunctional or have ended in separation or divorce; drove a black or dark blue vehicle (I had observed that orderly, compulsive people tended to drive darker cars); and a cocky, confident attitude. Since he had to have been around the abduction scene long enough to have noticed Mary Frances, I thought the police had probably questioned him as a potential witness.
When I finished my profile, they told me I had described a guy they had questioned and just released, named Darrell Gene Devier, a twenty-four-year-old white male who had also been a strong suspect in the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, but had never been charged. He’d dropped out of school after eighth grade despite an IQ listed at 100–110. He already was twice married and divorced, and currently living with his first ex-wife. He’d joined the army after the first divorce but went AWOL and was dishonorably discharged after seven months. He drove a three-year-old, well-maintained, black Ford Pinto. He was a tree trimmer and had been interviewed as a potential witness because he’d been working on trees for the local power company in the vicinity of the crime scene for about two weeks before Mary Frances was abducted. The police had enough suspicion that they’d scheduled him for a polygraph exam that day.
I told them I didn’t think that was a good idea. From my experience with the prison interviews, I’d come to the realization that people without a conscience, who can rationalize what they’ve done through depersonalizing their victims, don’t have the same emotional and physical reactions to lie detector tests as ordinary men and women. They called the next day to say that Devier’s polygraph was inconclusive, which I thought would only reinforce his own perceived ability to cope with the stress of interrogation.
Now that he knew he could beat the box, there would be only one way to get to him. I told them how to stage the interrogation scene, with the bloodstained rock just in his line of sight but positioned so he’d have to turn his head to look at it. If he is the killer, I told them, he will not be able to ignore the rock. And since Mary Frances had been struck several times in the head, I knew there was a good chance he got blood on him, which we could use to make him unsure of himself. Together with implying that the girl actually seduced him with her attitude, the combined police-FBI team got him to confess, even though Georgia was a death penalty state. This scene was portrayed in the first season of Mindhunter on Netflix, and the lesson is: Everybody has a “rock.” You just have to figure out what it is.
Several months later, in the spring of 1980, I got a call from Police Chief John Reeder of Logan Township, Pennsylvania, who was an FBI National Academy graduate. He and Blair County district attorney Oliver E. Mattas Jr. had been referred through Special Agent Dale Frye of the Bureau’s resident agency in Johnstown. About a year before, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Betty Jean Shade had been walking home at about 10:15 P.M. from a babysitting job when she apparently disappeared. Four days later, a man on a nature walk stumbled on her muti
lated body in an illegal garbage dump on Wopsononock Mountain, near Altoona. Not only had she been sexually assaulted, the county coroner said it was the “most gruesome” death he had ever encountered.
From the severe facial trauma, it was clear to me that the UNSUB knew the victim well. But unlike some of these I’ve seen, this was not a sadistic torture killing; most of the wounds were postmortem. Other behavior cues suggested an introverted loner, between seventeen and twenty-five, from a dysfunctional background with a broken family and a domineering mother. I was pretty sure he lived between Betty Jean’s home and the body dump site.
In our studies, we’d seen that well-planned crimes that showed a high degree of control and thought—and usually not much in the way of physical evidence left behind—were indicative of one type of offender: organized. By contrast, crimes seemingly committed spontaneously, the victim more one of situation and circumstance than a personal target, and the scenes in a state of disarray, with abundant physical evidence, were the work of a more disorganized subject. The degree of organization or disorganization of the crime was one of the key insights into the personality of the criminal. The Shade scene was what we called a mixed organized-disorganized crime presentation, which can mean a lot of things, but in this case suggested we were looking for more than one offender.
Police had two suspects in mind. One was the victim’s live-in boyfriend, Charles F. Soult Jr., known as Butch. The other was the man who found the body, who lived within four blocks of Betty Jean’s house and had tried unsuccessfully to pick her up on several occasions. He had a history of antisocial behavior and his alibi was unprovable. But he was married, with two children, and the postmortem mutilation just didn’t fit in with this profile. Butch Soult fit more of the profile elements, including a domineering mother and a reputation as being inept with women. His professions of passion for Betty Jean seemed over the top to me. I considered the possibility that they’d had an argument, she’d threatened to leave him, and the situation had escalated from there. When I found out Soult’s brother Mike was a trash hauler who’d had the same kind of upbringing as Butch, I became even more interested. I thought we could get the truth through Mike, hammering home that all he did was have sex with Betty Jean when Butch couldn’t perform, then help dispose of the body afterward. In the end, Butch was convicted of first-degree murder and Mike, with a plea agreement, was sent to a mental institution. I’m convinced these two would have killed again if not apprehended.
This was the most gratifying part of the job: helping bring justice to those victims and their families. Because just as these creeps depersonalized their prey, as someone like Darrell Gene Devier did, or carried out their depraved will to viciously punish them, like Butch Soult, my colleagues and I took the exact opposite approach. We personalized and glorified the victims. We had trained ourselves to visualize and actually feel what they went through at the very worst moments of their often all-too-brief lives. I think this was one of the lasting legacies we established. So many of the fictional portrayals of FBI profilers that have come along over the years talk about the importance of being able to put oneself in the mind of the criminal, which we certainly had to be able to do. But being able to put oneself in the mind and shoes of the victim is equally important. It not only helped us contextualize the entire physical and psychosocial environment of the crime—how the victim’s reaction affected the offender’s attitude, behavior, and actions as the crime unfolded—but also gave us even more motivation to work for the victim, who could no longer speak for her- or himself.
Chief Reeder, who had been trained in our methods, declared publicly that we had been directly instrumental in aiding the investigation into Betty Jean Shade’s murder, strategizing the interrogation, and figuring out how to obtain statements from the offenders.
This was the kind of positive publicity we were starting to get for the profiling program. Like John Reeder, a number of police chiefs and sheriffs around the country had called or written to the Bureau saying we had helped narrow a suspect list, focused an investigation, and/or helped with arrest and interrogation strategy. We were even getting calls from SACs saying they had to face the media on a particular case, asking what should they say that would be informative and proactive but not give away details they would later need in order to qualify or disqualify suspects. But, like Stoner and Shade, these had all been local cases that only generated notice within the law enforcement community. We hadn’t yet been involved with a case that garnered national media attention, and serial killers weren’t a known concept yet in the public imagination.
I can’t say that I yet had a vision for what profiling and our behaviorally based criminal investigative analysis approach would become, or how it would continue to grow, but I knew we had something to build on. In my wildest dreams, I envisioned a “flying squad” with its own lab-equipped airplane that could be dispatched on a moment’s notice to major crime scenes with a team made up of a crime scene tech, forensic scientist, pathologist, and one or two profiler-investigators, but I knew that was most likely an over-the-rainbow fantasy. There was already an inherent tension between headquarters and Quantico, which many of the bigwigs referred to as “the Country Club” because of our rural location and the perception that we spent a lot of our time just sitting around, contemplating. We, on the other hand, often regarded the denizens of the Hoover Building as a bunch of administrators and bureaucrats who had little idea of what the operational people in the field really did.
So, if Franklin was the case that could put us on the map within the walls of the FBI, it also posed heavy risks for us. The old-school hard-liners who had come up under the late founding director J. Edgar Hoover’s iron discipline and “Just the facts, ma’am” crime-solving approach, who kept score strictly by number of arrests, considered profiling and proactive strategies way too touchy-feely and would have been happy to see the whole idea scrapped and send us all back onto the streets. I was foreseeing a time when we’d have other agents doing what I was doing, but failure on a bigger and more prominent stage could put an end to the entire endeavor.
Of course, the biggest concern—much more than my career or even the future of the unit itself—was that this case was a highly visible ticking clock. A possible serial killer and presidential assassin was on the loose. For the sake of all the potential victims out there, we could not afford to fail.
THE J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING, WHICH HOUSES FBI NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS, is a massive gray concrete structure in what has been termed brutalist style by architectural critics. It occupies the prime block of downtown Washington, D.C., bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue, E Street, and Ninth and Tenth Streets, one block south of where President Lincoln was assassinated. It had been open for almost exactly five years, since September 1975, and in that time had acquired the reputation as being among the ugliest buildings in the nation’s capital, if not the ugliest. It is certainly one of the most forbidding, almost inviting you to turn away and walk in the opposite direction. In that, many said, it accurately reflected the personality of the iconic figure for whom it was named.
I pulled into the secure underground parking garage, showed my credentials, and took the elevator up to the executive floor. In those days, you could still see and smell cigarette smoke wafting from some of the offices. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a fair number of the desks had bottles of some sort of fortifying refreshment stashed in a bottom drawer.
The federal government had become involved in civil rights in the mid-1960s, when it was nearly impossible to convict white defendants in the South accused of killing African Americans or those who supported their quest for equal rights. The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—three young civil rights workers trying to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964—by Ku Klux Klan members and officials from the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia, Mississippi, Police Department outraged much of the nation.
But the state of Mississippi refused to prosecute. The same year, all-white juries in Mississippi failed twice to convict Byron De La Beckwith of the murder of civil rights activist and NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers as he was pulling into the driveway of his home. Both trials ended with hung juries. The year before, Alabama had refused to prosecute the four FBI-developed KKK suspects in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls, aged eleven to fourteen.
Because of these and so many other outrageous lapses of justice throughout the burning South of the 1950s and ’60s, it was left to the Department of Justice to prosecute these state murders as federal civil rights violations. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was an unwilling participant, equating the struggle for racial equality with Communist infiltration into the American way of life. (He equated a lot of things with Communist infiltration into the American way of life.) But Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and finally the 1964 Civil Rights Act pushed the Bureau into a more active role in prosecuting civil rights violations, especially when the state wouldn’t act.
By the time Joe Schulte and Dave Kohl were involved with the Civil Rights Division, the dynamic had evolved quite a bit, and even southern states were taking a more active stance (though Byron De La Beckwith, for example, was not convicted in a state court until 1994; and the case of the three Freedom Summer martyrs was not reopened by the state until 2005). By 1980, the decision of whether to go first for state or federal prosecution in racially motivated cases that could be legally deemed civil rights violations was largely one of strategy—which case had the strongest evidence and the best chance for conviction.
When I got upstairs, I walked down the hall to Dave Kohl’s office. I knocked lightly on his partially opened door and he looked up and gave me his best sardonic smile. “I hope you’re ready for this one, John,” he said. “Because, you know, if you screw up, Director Webster’s already signed your transfer papers to Butte, Montana. All we have to do is file them.” In those days, that was the hellhole of the Bureau, where Hoover would send agents he had condemned to purgatory.
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