Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  The deputies found Suzanne’s body facedown about 150 feet from the road, with her shirt and athletic shorts, socks, underwear and exercise belt scattered nearby.

  This is what Dr. Bell wrote in his autopsy report: Death was due to multiple injuries inflicted by blunt trauma to the head, pressing on the neck and pushing 20½ inches of a 31 inch long, 1½ inch diameter sharply beveled tree limb up the perineum through the abdomen into the right chest tearing abdominal and chest organs and producing internal hemorrhaging.

  That was the summary. The entire report was twenty-one pages long. It detailed a bloody head, a left eye swollen shut and bite marks on the left breast. Bruises covered both shoulder blades, and scratches ran from the shoulders to the waist. What it did not mention was that her face was so badly beaten that the photographs the Navy Security personnel had furnished to the police and sheriff’s deputies couldn’t help much in the identification.

  “Okay,” I challenged my audience after reading this description out loud and showing some of the least graphic crime scene photos, “do you understand what this means? It means she was overpowered in a surprise attack while she was jogging. That someone hit her repeatedly on the head with a hard object. It could have been anything—a hammer, a baseball bat, the effect would have been the same. It means this beautiful blond girl, this young woman who had proven herself as a U.S. Marine, had been so brutalized that she didn’t look like herself anymore.”

  My hands were shaking and my fingers were gripped into claws as I talked, because I can’t describe a victim’s ordeal without emotion, as many times as I’ve been over it, as many times as I’ve presented it to law enforcement groups.

  When I present this case, as I’ve done frequently, I use descriptions like this:

  It’s dark. He gets her in his car and he drives her off base. Whenever she comes to enough to try to resist, he hits her again. When they get to this park, he drags her out of the car, rips all her clothes off. Then he breaks a limb off a tree. The report says it’s an inch and a half in diameter and almost a yard long. And in some kind of inhuman sexual rage, he takes this sharp, jagged tree limb and he shoves it. He forces it between her legs and pushes it up as far as he can, as hard as he can. The medical examiner measured how far that it was—it was almost two feet. What I’m saying is that he raped her with this thick sharp stick and shoved it up so hard and so far that he tore through every organ in its path, up to and including her right lung.

  Witnesses later testified that they heard a hideous “death scream” coming from somewhere in the park.

  I looked out over my audience. I wanted them to understand, to feel at least a little of the revulsion, at least a little of the horror. Some of them were crying. Some of them had an almost blank expression on their faces. Most likely, they were all feeling, How could anyone do something like this to another human being?

  The attempt to answer that question, or at least the explanation for it, is the reason I got involved in the case. The prosecution asked me to help them explain that very question to an uncomprehending jury in light of the defense that was being offered. But let’s not get ahead of the story.

  It didn’t take police long to come up with a suspect. In fact, Navy Security officials identified him even before they knew Suzanne had been murdered.

  Around eleven on the night of July 11, two marines, Private First Class Michael Howard and Private First Class Mark Shotwell, were jogging when they saw a female jogger matching Suzanne’s description. Soon after, they noticed a car—a dark-colored, mid-1970s Ford wagon, they thought—with its high beams on, heading in the same direction as the jogger.

  They heard screams and immediately took off in that direction, but they were suddenly blinded by the glare of oncoming headlights. In the few moments before they regained their night vision, they lost the car they were pursuing, so they ran to the nearest base gate and told the guard on duty, David Davenport. Davenport called base security, adding that he had seen a car of the same description leaving the base. The driver was male and had his arm around a woman. He recalled that the plates on the car were from Kentucky. Richard Rogers, chief of the watch for that part of the base, issued a “be on the lookout” (BOLO) to the entire base, Millington PD and Shelby County Sherriff’s Department. Then he sent a security unit over to the gate and got in his own car to help look for the Kentucky car himself.

  About ten minutes after midnight on July 12, Rogers spotted a car matching Davenport’s description and stopped it. He brought the driver back to the security office for questioning.

  His name was Sedley Alley. He was a white male, twenty-nine years of age. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. His wife, Lynne, was an enlisted woman in the navy, working at the air base. He was a laborer who had had a string of jobs, most recently working for a company that did air-conditioning installations and repairs.

  Rogers called Lynne Alley and asked her to come in. She seemed to match the description of the woman in the car. Sedley said the scream the two joggers heard was actually just part of a domestic dispute that had now been settled. Rogers had no choice but to let them go. Shotwell and Howard were in the security office at the time, giving their statements. As they drove off, both said they were certain from the loud muffler sound that this was the car they had seen and heard.

  As soon as Rogers had been notified about the discovery of Suzanne’s body, he directed two of his patrolmen to arrest Sedley Alley and bring him back in. Since the abduction had occurred on a federal reservation, he also called the FBI Resident Agency in Memphis, which sent two agents to the scene. When agents of the Naval Investigative Service seized Alley’s car, they found several bloodstains, both inside and out.

  At first, Alley denied any knowledge or involvement in the crime and asked for an attorney. But as that was being arranged, he said he changed his mind and wanted to tell what had happened.

  He had been out drinking. Then, back in his car, he had spotted the pretty blond marine jogging. He pulled over to talk to her, but accidentally rammed her with his car. She fell down, unconscious or semiconscious, so he picked her up and put her in his car to take her to the emergency room. As they were en route, she woke up and started resisting, fighting with him, trying to get out. It got so intense, so quickly, that before he could explain to her what had happened and where he was taking her, he leaned over in a panic and hit her on the head to keep her quiet, not realizing he was holding a screwdriver in his hand. The screwdriver was at hand because it was a beat-up old car that wouldn’t start with a key, and so he would use the screwdriver to start it.

  She was suddenly quiet and stopped moving, so he was afraid he’d hit her harder than he intended and accidentally killed her. Panicking even more, he stopped at Edmund Orgill Park. He checked her vitals and he was pretty sure she was dead. That’s when he got the idea to divert suspicion from what really happened by staging a sexual assault. He carried her into the park and removed her clothing. Then he broke off the tree limb and inserted it into her dead body in a sexualized manner.

  There are three true statements in this account. He had been out drinking; he did spot the pretty blond marine jogging; he did use a screwdriver to start his car. It was found less than half a mile away from the park in the direction of the base. Everything else is a blatant and self-serving fabrication.

  With the numerous wounds all over Suzanne’s body, none matched up with either being struck by an automobile or jabbed in the head with a screwdriver. The medical examiner was quite clear that the horrific attack with the tree limb occurred while she was still alive and the “death scream” heard by three earwitnesses in the park corresponded to the time Suzanne would have died. Moreover, the damage to the internal organs strongly indicated that the offender had pulled the jagged tree limb out and shoved it in again, three or four times. This is not staging. This is intentional behavior of the most hideous form imaginable.

  Alley was nine inches taller and nearly twice Suza
nne’s weight. Given the fact that he took her by surprise, even in marine fighting trim, it would have been virtually impossible for her to fend him off.

  Lynne told investigators that she had been out at a Tupperware party with girlfriends, and Sedley wasn’t home when she returned. She didn’t see him until she was called in for questioning by Navy Security during the night. The next morning, she noticed grass stains inside the car, but she figured they had been caused by their two dogs, which frequently rode in the car.

  Other details about Sedley Alley quickly emerged. He had been married before, in Ashland, Kentucky. On February 28, 1980, three days after his twenty-year-old first wife, Debra, filed for divorce, she was found dead in the bathtub. Alley had told investigators she was out drinking that night with other men, had come home drunk, took a bath and must have drowned. It was several hours before Sedley called for an ambulance. The ME noted numerous bruises and strangulation marks on her neck. She had a French fry stuck in her throat and it was ruled that she had asphyxiated, choking on her own vomit.

  The death was ruled questionable and Sedley Alley was never prosecuted. Shelby County assistant district attorney (ADA) Henry “Hank” Williams told us that if he had been the prosecutor in Kentucky, he definitely would have pursued the case and gone for a murder indictment. Had that been done, Suzanne Collins would almost assuredly still be alive today.

  Murder cases tend to emphasize the extremes of human behavior, motive and principles, both bad and good. And Hank Williams is one of the genuine heroes of this one, as well as an exemplar of what a righteous prosecutor and a complete human being should be. A former FBI special agent, he knew as soon as he was handed the case and went over the file that he was going all the way. If ever a crime called for the death penalty, Williams thought, this was it. The ADA made it clear he was not interested in even talking about a plea bargain.

  Aside from fervently prosecuting the case, he also became a supportive friend to the Collins family, spending countless hours listening to their anguish and fears and concerns, counseling them, trying to give them the psychological support he felt they needed.

  And he had good support. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Laurenzi, who had been brought up to speed by both the Naval Investigative Service and the FBI, assured Williams’s office that if, for any reason, he couldn’t secure a capital indictment in state court, he was prepared to seek one in the federal system, since kidnapping is a federal crime. It turned out not to be an issue. Sedley Alley was charged with murder in the first degree of Suzanne Marie Collins.

  CHAPTER 8

  AN EMPTY SEAT, A FLAG AT HALF-STAFF

  The graduation ceremony for Marine Aviation Support Squadron 902 was a solemn affair. The flag flew at half-staff and an empty seat was prominent among the graduates, who had expected to feel so happy.

  The following Wednesday, July 17, Memphis Naval Air Station held a memorial service for Suzanne at the base chapel, officiated by her commanding officer, Colonel Robert Clapp. At the end, when the band played the “Marines’ Hymn,” and then a lone bugler played “Taps,” there were hardly any dry eyes in the audience of the toughest of America’s fighting forces.

  Though the viciousness of the attack had left Suzanne so disfigured that her parents had already decided on a closed-casket funeral, when her body arrived back in Virginia, Jack and Trudy and Stephen had to look upon her one final time.

  “We had to know, as best we could, everything that had happened to her,” Jack explained.

  When the casket was opened and they saw her, in blue dress uniform and white gloves, they could not believe anyone could possibly do anything so savage, so horrible, to another human being.

  “My heart cried. My soul cried. I was screaming inside,” Jack recalled.

  The following month, they would travel down to Millington and visit the spot where Suzanne was found. They would insist on reading the autopsy report, on seeing the photographs of her body, the close-ups of every wound. When they arrived at the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, Sergeant Gordon Neighbours introduced himself and spontaneously hugged Trudy.

  In any civilized society, I don’t think there is any category of death worse than the death of a child while his or her parents still live. It is an experience that turns the natural order upside down, that demands more in the way of strength and emotional resources than any rational person has to give. It can bring family members together or tear them apart; it can test faith or destroy it. But it leaves none as they were; it is utterly transformative. And within this unfortunate category, there can be no death more horrible than the death of a child by murder. You would be hard-pressed to come up with a more devastating occurrence in the entire world.

  Though it had to rank as the most dreadful experience of their lives, this act of Jack and Trudy’s—this final bearing of witness—is not an uncommon one among the parents of murdered children.

  Our book Obsession told the story of Katie Sousa, whose beautiful little eight-year-old daughter, Destiny, known as “Dee,” was horrifically beaten to death by Katie’s sister’s boyfriend, Robert Miller. Katie had generously let her sister and Miller live in her house while they got back on their feet. After the murder, Katie insisted that she wanted to see everything: the murder file, the medical examiner’s report, the autopsy photos. Then, when she went to the funeral home to make arrangements for Dee’s burial, Katie insisted that they bring out Dee’s body for her to examine.

  The funeral director and the friend who accompanied her both pled with her not to go through with this. The body had just arrived and they hadn’t had time to prepare it yet for viewing.

  That was exactly the condition in which Katie wanted to see her. “Bring her out!” she ordered.

  They had Katie go to a viewing room and brought Dee’s body, cold from refrigeration, covered by a sheet. She was not content just to see her daughter’s bruised face and the dotted puncture wound on her scalp, where her plastic barrette literally had been driven into her skull when Miller smashed her head with a heavy wooden jewelry box, ostensibly to punish her for “mouthing off ” to him.

  She described for us how she told them to remove the sheet. She wanted to examine Dee’s naked body, inch by inch, from the top of her skull to the soles of her feet. She spent about forty-five minutes doing this. She wanted to understand—to experience—everything that had been done to this innocent child. She needed to take the suffering and pain onto herself and make it hers. With her little girl dead, that was the only way she felt she could go on living.

  Carroll Ellis, who was then director of the Victim Services Section of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Police Department, likened it to the image of the Pietà. “I still see in my mind this Madonna with child in this private moment, seeing her child’s wounds with her own eyes.”

  This is what Jack and Trudy and Stephen Collins experienced as they stared at Suzanne’s unrecognizable face. Though the morticians had done their best, it looked nothing like the beautiful girl they had loved.

  This quiet insistence on confronting the murder in all its brutality speaks to the love and courage and passion of so many of the parents of murdered children we have known. When I think of the individuals who have carried out this final viewing of their beloved children, I know I speak for all law enforcement officers when I quote Carroll’s simple rhetorical question: “In the name of God, how dare they?”

  Lance Corporal Suzanne Marie Collins, who had died on active duty in a uniformed service of the United States, was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery on July 18, 1985. It was a warm and sunny afternoon. There were too many mourners for the funeral service at the old Fort Myer Chapel. Many had to listen from outside.

  In the weeks following the funeral, Jack and Trudy were overwhelmed by the number of letters, phone calls, gifts and other tributes they received—many from people they had never met, all of whom attested to the effect Suzanne had had on their lives. Apparently, others ha
d known the same wonderful girl, with the same magical personality, as they had. But each had a personal and individual story to tell about what Suzanne had meant to them.

  That was the kind of girl . . . that was the kind of woman Suzanne was.

  CHAPTER 9

  DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE

  Sedley Alley, meanwhile, had several stories of his own to tell. But not, of course, about Suzanne Collins. Someone like Alley would only be concerned about himself and how the whole situation had affected his life.

  After first admitting that he had killed Suzanne (though accidentally, in his rendition) and walking police through the various crime sites, he said he didn’t remember any of it. This was the story he told his two court-appointed attorneys, Robert Jones and Ed Thompson, both prominent and highly respected members of the Memphis defense bar. After they brought in a psychologist, who examined and hypnotized their client, Alley came down (or up, depending on your interpretation) with multiple personality disorder (MPD). It seemed there were three warring personalities in that hulking body: regular Sedley, a female persona named Billie and Death. He later told state psychologist Dr. Samuel Craddock that it was Death who killed Suzanne, though Craddock testified at trial that the so-called normal Sedley personality showed no remorse for the victim. None of this had turned up in Alley’s initial statement to the police, which was recorded in full, further refuting the MPD claim.