Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  Dr. Craddock saw no evidence of MPD, but he came up with a very reasonable diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). So named because it was thought to exist on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis, this disorder is characterized by severe emotional instability, anger, rigid thinking, narcissism, paranoia and a general lack of empathy, among other characteristics. Various other members of the examining team came up with a similar diagnosis.

  The defense said it needed more time to evaluate Alley’s condition and got a six-month postponement in the trial that Hank Williams had been pushing hard to get started.

  From my experience in all the investigations and trials I’ve worked and studied, MPD is one of the great classic nonsense defenses. If you’ve pretty much tied yourself to the crime, and the physical evidence has done the rest, it’s one of the few strategies available that can at least deny or mitigate your culpability. A traditional insanity plea is pretty much an uphill climb: “You mean, at the time, you couldn’t tell it was wrong to abduct a young woman, beat her senseless and then shove a tree branch between her legs and up through her body?” Not likely to go over with any sane and rational jury.

  But MPD? Well, that might have some potential. For one thing, no one’s really going to understand it; it’s kind of mysterious and spooky. And it maintains the logic that the “real” you is an okay guy; it’s just these demons messing with your mind that are doing the bad stuff.

  I don’t mean to suggest that multiple personality disorder doesn’t exist, because it definitely does. The problem with it as a defense against a charge of violent crime is that it is very rare, and at that, much more prevalent in women than in men, and nearly always first manifests itself in early to middle childhood. All the MPD cases we’ve seen are a reaction to severe sexual and physical abuse, a coping mechanism allowing the child victim to split off into safer or stronger personalities to separate from his or her grim reality. Sometimes one of these personalities is an avenger who can get back at the abuser, but it is a fantasy existence. MPD cases are not always easy to diagnose, but any competent individual in the health or education field will be able to tell that something is wrong, and should seek help for the child.

  None of the experts we’ve consulted knows of a case in which MPD makes a nonviolent person become violent. I am particularly skeptical when an MPD diagnosis arises not in childhood, but in postarrest adulthood.

  Alley’s psychiatrists concluded that his MPD had come from a combination of emotional abuse at the hands of his father and a childhood urinary tract infection that had prompted him to create a female persona.

  After four postponements, each of which the Collinses found excruciating, Sedley Alley’s trial commenced in March 1987. Fearing that the jury might not be able to comprehend a motive for so horrific and senseless a crime other than insanity, Hank Williams contacted the FBI’s Memphis Field Office, which relayed the request that I come down to help with prosecutorial strategy. There was also hope that Alley might take the stand; if he did, I could help the prosecutors draw him out and show the jury the kind of person he really was. This approach had worked quite well in the Wayne Williams Atlanta Child Murders trial, when my coaching had helped the prosecutor to get Williams to explode. I sat behind the prosecutor’s table, made observations and offered my perspective.

  As it turned out, though, Alley did not choose to testify in his own defense. It certainly wouldn’t have helped him.

  During that trial, I got to know Jack and Trudy Collins quite well. We were staying at the same hotel and became close friends. I could see that they were devastated—shell-shocked, even—but their courage and fortitude were consistent and amazing. Despite Jack’s law degree and their sophisticated background in the American Foreign Service, they still couldn’t fathom how one human being could do this to another. It was as if they were coming to me for answers.

  I tried to give them the same analysis of Alley’s behavior that I had given Hank Williams: that even though the crime was as depraved as any I had seen, it was still the work of someone who knew what he was doing. There were some mixed elements to the evidence, but we were definitely dealing with an organized type of killer, rather than a disorganized one. When you see a genuinely, severely mentally ill individual commit a murder—which is rare—the presentation is overwhelmingly disorganized.

  Seeing a young woman jogging on base at night, the offender had to assume she was a service member in excellent physical condition, with knowledge of close-order combat and an aggressive disposition if attacked. In spite of this, using his overwhelming height and weight advantage, he was able to blitz attack her by surprise, get her into his car and drive her to a familiar location, where he knew he could be alone with her. He was able to accomplish this even with two marines running after him as fast as they could. These are all indications of an organized offender.

  The targeting of Suzanne was clearly a matter of opportunity, but it didn’t “just happen.” There would have been a precipitating event or series of them. He would already have been in a murderous rage, to begin with; his inhibitions would have been further lowered by alcohol. Likewise, the handiness of the tree limb was a matter of opportunity, but thrusting a sharp, phallic-like object between the victim’s legs is the fulfillment of a developed fantasy. In a storage room in Alley’s house, police found a twenty-inch-long stick wrapped with tape and bearing an unidentified stain.

  This is all completely characteristic of a “lust murderer,” a term Special Agent Roy Hazelwood and I coined more than thirty years ago for an analytical article we did for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The lust murderer is a particularly repulsive form of sociopath who kills—and kills the way he does—quite simply because it makes him feel good, because it fulfills an urge in him, a lust, that is satisfied in no other way than by literally destroying his victim.

  This type of individual is continually wrestling with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, which is why the perverse sexuality of the crime is often manifested in forms other than traditional rape. There is no evidence that Alley penetrated Suzanne with his penis, though that in no way negates the sexualized nature of the crime. The fact that blood was found on Alley’s shorts suggests that he rubbed himself up against her after killing her. Not terribly surprising, investigators found a mail order penis-enlarging device in Alley’s toolbox. He probably kept it there to avoid the humiliation of Lynne finding it somewhere in the house.

  The necrophilia aspect of the crime points us in two complementary directions. It underscores the inadequacy of the individual, who knows he could never make it with a girl of Suzanne’s caliber under “normal” circumstances. It also demonstrates the perpetrator’s need to control, in ways he cannot do in real life. We’ll never know whether he tried to come on to Suzanne and she quickly rejected him, or if he didn’t even bother and just decided to take her forcefully. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

  And this gets us back to the precipitating factors. Despite the unspeakable cruelty and brutality of the crime, the offender was not a sexual sadist like others we have seen. He did not hurt her for the sexual pleasure he would derive from seeing her suffer and hearing her scream. The savage beating around the head, something we often see in the murder of spouses or former girlfriends, is not to punish or cause pain so much as to dominate and then obliterate. In other words, what he wanted to do was destroy this woman and her beauty and all they represented to him.

  Though it might seem a subtle distinction in the midst of this inhuman barbarity, I would want the jury to understand that all of the behavioral indicators told us that this rage was displaced anger against someone else, as well as a general hostility toward women. As we will soon see, this proved to be prophetically true.

  Let’s get back to the insanity defense that was employed at the trial, and review insanity in its legal sense. Actually, its legal sense is the only official sense it has, because “insanity” is not a term used by modern psychiatrists
and mental-health workers.

  The insanity defense has undergone many attempts at definition and interpretation since it was first used in England in the trial of Daniel M’Naghten who wanted to assassinate Prime Minster Robert Peel in 1843. Instead, he actually murdered Peel’s private secretary Edward Drummond whom he shot at point-blank range emerging from Peel’s house. Despite the years since then, this type of defense relies on the same basic and commonsense principles: Did the defendant know right from wrong? Did the defendant know that his actions were wrong? Was the defendant able to conform his behavior to the rules and norms of society?

  The last two questions are stated in a neat hypothetical construct known popularly as the “policeman at the elbow” doctrine. It posits: If the perpetrator saw a uniformed police officer nearby, would he have still committed the act or would he have restrained himself? If he would have gone ahead and done it, he was probably suffering from an “irresistible impulse” and is therefore not guilty for his actions by reason of insanity. But if he could restrain himself, that suggests that he could conform his behavior and also knew his intentions to be wrong, something the officer would not tolerate.

  Defense attorney Robert Jones tried to get the jury to buy the idea that the crime was so horrible, it had to be the work of some deranged mind because no one in his right mind could have done such a thing. I was there to counteract the concept of being able to use the monstrousness of the crime itself as a mitigating defense.

  Am I implying that Sedley Alley did not have severe emotional problems or was not mentally ill? Not at all. I assume he did have severe emotional problems, and I have no real way of knowing whether he was mentally ill or not. However, I think it’s fair to say that on a certain level, most, if not all, individuals who commit violent and intentional murder probably have some significant degree of mental illness—significantly further along the mental-health continuum than “normal” people. This distinction, however, falls more into the realm of psychiatry than law enforcement. And though the two fields often work hand in hand, they each have their own agendas.

  When laypeople consider the insanity issue, it is sometimes difficult for good and decent folks to understand that a suspect can be mentally ill and still be sane and rational. The question is not whether Suzanne Collins’s killer was mentally ill, emotionally disturbed or suffering from a character disorder. The question is whether he knew right from wrong, understood that what he did was wrong and could control himself to the point of not doing it if he thought he would be seen and caught.

  In my mind, there was no question from the physical evidence and the behavioral presentation that Suzanne’s killer was sane and capable of comprehending and controlling his actions.

  Nothing came out during the trial that in any way supported the claim of multiple personality disorder or any other crippling mental disease. The closest was Alley’s mother, Jane, who testified, “There’s always been something wrong with him.”

  Yeah, he’s a sociopath. But that doesn’t make him legally insane.

  In his closing arguments, prosecution co-counsel Bobby Carter said to the jury, “You’ve observed him for two weeks now, and he’s been able to control his behavior.”

  On March 18, 1987, the jury of ten women and two men received the case. They deliberated for about six hours before returning a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated rape. They took another two hours to ponder the punishment, during which time they determined that the murder was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel,” and that it was committed during a kidnapping or rape. They recommended execution, a recommendation Judge W. Fred Axley accepted, along with the imposition of consecutive forty-year prison sentences for the two lesser charges. Judge Axley set the date for death by electrocution as September 11, though everyone knew that was merely a formality. The appeals process was the beginning of the next stage of the family’s ordeal.

  CHAPTER 10

  ONE INDIVIDUAL STORY

  “So here he sits on death row,” I said as I concluded my presentation at Vanderbilt, “and he’s been on death row longer than Suzanne Collins was alive. How about that?” I turned off the PowerPoint and looked out into the silent audience.

  Then I told them about the Collins family, about how they had pledged themselves to “going the distance” with Suzanne, until justice was finally carried out, and that they could not rest until that happened. I told them that when Jack and Trudy, who had moved out of the area, came back up to Washington, DC, they would stay with Mark and his wife, Carolyn, and how we would all go out to Arlington Cemetery together to visit Suzanne’s grave.

  Jack would talk to her; his strong religious faith had convinced him that there was an existence beyond death. “Sue, it’s Mom and Dad. Carolyn and Mark and John are here with us. They’re fighting our battle for justice for you. You’re not alone, Sue. You’ll never be alone, and your friends will always be there for you, active in the fight.”

  It was difficult to maintain our composure.

  Shortly after Suzanne’s burial, Jack had taken up the Jewish custom of having each visitor find a small stone and place it on top of her gravestone. There are several interpretations of what this custom signifies. To Jack, as to others, it was a way of commemorating the visit and showing that those who loved and cared about Suzanne were with her spiritually twenty-four hours a day.

  His ritual also included asking visitors with any kind of religious orientation to recite the appropriate memorial prayer from their own faith, after which he would recite the last verse of the English-Irish folk ballad “Danny Boy”:

  And if you come, when all the flowers are dying

  And I am dead, as dead I well may be

  You’ll come and find the place where I am lying

  And kneel and say an “Ave” there for me.

  And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me

  And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be

  For you will bend and tell me that you love me

  And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

  As his final act, he would kneel and kiss the headstone.

  But this was only the beginning of his and Trudy’s devotion. They became part of the Fairfax, Virginia, homicide support group (officially known as the Peer Survivors Group) run by Carroll Ellis, and began attending their regular meetings. They reached out to other survivors of loved ones’ deaths, and eventually appeared on television and radio shows, presenting the victims’ points of view.

  Their message was simple and powerful, and still is. They discussed the ineffable grief that they and Steve had all been through—grief that challenged even Jack’s strong Catholic faith—that threatened to tear them apart or leave them unable to even function. They described how the death of a child, particularly a violent death, can rend a marriage and how they struggled to keep each other afloat when either of them was dangerously down. They explained how they would never be the same again, that the pain would never leave them, but that they found they were able to go on to a rich and full life—a life even more suffused with meaning than their previous ones had been.

  And they pointed out that theirs was only one individual story.

  There is an old principle in journalism that showing an entire battlefield of bodies is not nearly as effective as focusing on a single one. Similarly, statistics are not nearly as compelling to emotional response as a single story. But the Collinses’ message was akin to the one we have tried to deliver in presenting narratives of individual cases: Their single loss was devastating to so many people who knew and loved their daughter. Yet it was only one. Murders take place all the time, all over the nation and the world (though more, proportionately, in the United States than virtually any other Westernized nation). So take the grief and anguish from our case, Jack and Trudy were saying, and multiply it by all the cases every year and you get a sense of the enormity of the evil.

  Crime victims and their survivor
s tend to be leery of the term “vengeance” because of its implications of vindictiveness and retaliation. Personally, I see nothing wrong with those sentiments, but I get their point. The term many of them prefer is “retribution,” meaning something justly deserved, a punishment or repayment based on action or performance. Either way, the point is that the justice system, in the limited way in which it is able, attempts to balance the scales between the victim and the offender.

  As we’ve noted, even at its best, this is a very imperfect resolution, particularly in the case of murder. We can’t bring back the dead. But even trying to establish some moral equilibrium in society is, I think, absolutely critical. Without the sense that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and that there are appropriate consequences to violating society’s most basic values, the concepts of morality and right and wrong become meaningless.

  And then you have no society.

  CHAPTER 11

  GOING THE DISTANCE

  “You citizens of Tennessee voted for politicians who supported the death penalty,” I said to my audience at Vanderbilt. “So you carry it on the books, you let your juries who represent you impose it, but you don’t carry it out.”

  I told them how the organizers of the conference didn’t want me to show crime scene photos because their use would revictimize the family. “But that’s not what revictimizes the family. What revictimizes the family is announcing what the sentence is supposed to be, then not imposing it in twenty years. How can the family rest easy when they haven’t been able to see that sentence carried out?”

  “What about life without parole?” someone asked.

  “That’s fine, if that’s what your law says, and you really mean it,” I replied. “Some states have that. And if that was the sentence the jury and judge handed down, and you could be sure of it, okay. But if you support the death penalty in this state, then what possible crime could be more deserving of death than this one? If you don’t use it here, then it’s meaningless, and then what you have is a travesty of justice.”