Was this an obvious profile? Yes and no. As I indicated earlier, the police were intensely investigating people linked personally to Roscetti, and continuing on that path would have taken them further and further astray. The profile allowed the police to refocus the investigation, and thereby sped up the case. Armed with the profile—and the lure of reward money for information—police put the word out on the streets of the black neighborhoods adjoining the crime sites that they were looking for young black men who had bragged of taking money from a woman medical student, or of doing anything else associated with Roscetti’s murder. The community rather readily came up with a number of nicknames—Shim-Sham was one—that were tracked down, and youngsters were hauled in for questioning. The youngest of the four suspects was fourteen; interrogated, he admitted to the crime, as did two other perpetrators, aged seventeen and sixteen. Between them, these latter two already had more than two dozen arrests and convictions for previous offenses, and both had served time in youth reformatories. A fourth youth was still being sought when the whole story emerged. After a night out, the foursome had run out of money and were looking for a car to rob. They waited about fifteen minutes until they saw a car with a lone white female stopped at a light. Two had stood in front of the car, betting that the driver wouldn’t run them over, while another tried the doors. Finding a door open, he climbed into it and opened the other doors for his companions. After that, the foursome had driven Roscetti to the trestle site, where they stabbed her with a sharpened stick she had kept in the car for protection, and had put her over the hood of the car and raped her before beating her into unconsciousness. When she stirred again, they smashed in her head with a piece of concrete wrapped in a plastic bag, and ran her car over her body. Then the attackers had walked to the Abla projects where three of them lived and where the fourth used to reside.
The fourth suspect, eighteen, eventually surrendered in the custody of a local television newsman who was known for such assistance. Later, several of the suspects tried to recant their early confessions and claimed these had been coerced by the police. The jury evidently didn’t believe the recantations, and all four were convicted. Three were sent to prison, and the youngest to a youth facility. The escort system Lori had fought for was reinstated. Neither the convictions nor the beefed-up security brought Lori Roscetti back, of course, but the law’s vengeance and the future protection of other potential victims were the only solace available to the community, to Lori’s family and friends, and to Dr. Cavanaugh and the staff of the medical center.
* * *
Many of the cases that the FBI profiles have to do with offenders who have already been caught but whose crimes are so unusual that the local authorities seek guidance on how to proceed. One morning during Thanksgiving week of November 1985, a teenaged girl, nude, handcuffs on hands and feet, and quite weak from loss of blood, crawled along a road near Malabar, Florida, seeking help. Several trucks passed her by, but then a motorist stopped.
“You’re not going to take me back to that house, are you?” the terrified girl asked.
The motorist responded that he would help her, and got her into the car. She asked him to “remember that house,” which she pointed out to him, a few doors away, a place with a well-kept lawn, many trees, a swimming pool and patio. The motorist took her home and called the police and an ambulance. At the hospital, it was determined that she had lost between 40 and 45 percent of her blood and that there were ligature marks on her neck as well as on her hands and ankles.
As she recovered, the nineteen-year-old told the police that one day earlier she had been hitchhiking in Brevard County on her way to a friend’s home and had been picked up by a man wearing a sport coat and a tie. He offered to take her most of the way but said he had to stop at his home and pick something up. At the house, he asked the hitchhiker to come inside. When she said no, he went around to the back of the car, got in behind her, and threw a nylon rope around her and choked her into unconsciousness.
The hitchhiker awoke to find that she was tied to a kitchen countertop, arms and legs immobilized. A video camera had been set up, along with lights. The man raped her and videotaped the action. Then he inserted needles into her arm and wrist and carefully extracted blood and began to drink it, telling her that he was a vampire. After that, he handcuffed her and put her in the bathtub, returning later for another round of sexual assault and blood extraction. The next morning, after a third round, the man handcuffed the hitchhiker and left her in the bathroom, saying that he would be back later for further assaults, and that if she tried to escape in the interim, his brother would come and kill her. It was after the attacker had left the house that she was able to push out the bathroom window and crawl to the road. Had she not escaped then, doctors believed, she might well have died from a further round of blood extraction.
The house that she described to the police belonged to John Brennan Crutchley, thirty-nine, a computer engineer for the Harris Corporation, a NASA contractor. He was married and had one child; both his wife and child were in Maryland, visiting her family for the holidays. A search warrant was obtained and served on Crutchley’s home at two-thirty the next morning. During this serving, Crutchley was arrested, some obvious items of interest were seized, and photographs were taken of the residence. The hitchhiker initially did not want to file charges against Crutchley, but she was convinced to do so by a rape counselor, on the grounds that convicting Crutchley would prevent him from assaulting other women. The victim took and passed a lie-detector test about the rapes, and Crutchley was charged with sexual battery, kidnapping, and aggravated battery of the hitchhiker, as well as possession of marijuana and of drug paraphernalia.
The well-meaning police search had seized some of the obvious items, such as the video camera, the hook in the ceiling where the hitchhiker had been tied, the marijuana, and some of the other paraphernalia of the assaults, but they had not been in time to prevent the erasure of the sections of videotape. According to the victim, this video would have contained the record of the assault on the hitchhiker. After the search, it was not entirely clear what the police had and what they had missed, nor even what they ought to be looking for in further searches. The police authorities contacted me for assistance, and, during a trip to Florida for other purposes, I went to Titusville to render it.
I was very glad they asked me to get involved in the case, because while the police knew they had caught a dangerous rapist, after I found out a few things about Crutchley, I thought it probable that they had a serial killer in custody.
One of the greatest problems in law enforcement today is that the police don’t know how to deal with unusual cases; specifically, they don’t know what to look for at a crime scene, and in a search that doesn’t grab everything that could be of interest, time is allowed for the suspect and his associates to hide or destroy what could be of vital importance to the case. It was my task initially to tell the police what to look for in a second search. For instance, the police photographs of Crutchley’s house showed a stack of credit cards, several inches thick; by the time of the second search, these had been removed and had presumably been destroyed.
Those credit cards and such things as the presence of a dozen or more women’s necklaces that hung on a hook in Crutchley’s closet (and which I thought were trophies), as well as the presence in the house of identification cards from two other women, pointed me in the direction of believing that the abduction of the hitchhiker was not Crutchley’s first offense. When asked about these identification cards, Crutchley said he had given rides to the women and they had left the cards in his car and he had had no opportunity to return them. He avowed that the necklaces belonged to his wife, and said that the hitchhiker had been a “Manson girl” who had solicited kinky sex from him.
There had been a four female bodies found in remote sites in Brevard County during the previous year, and police investigated whether Crutchley might have killed these women, but authorities could find no
evidentiary connection between Crutchley and those bodies. The second searches that I recommended included excavations on his property and searches of his offices at the Harris Corporation. These turned up the fact that the stack of credit cards had disappeared and that Crutchley appeared to have illegal possession of a great deal of highly classified information on naval weaponry and communications. Some of this was on diskettes that he had protected by a code, which authorities were able to break. Other federal agencies considered opening an espionage case against him. We found a stack of seventy-two three-by-five-inch cards containing women’s first names, their telephone numbers, and Crutchley’s evaluation of their sexual performances. Some of these women were telephoned by the authorities, and they gave some indications that they had been restrained or assaulted by Crutchley, but the majority said only that they had participated in kinky behavior with him. There were indications that his wife had done so, as well.
I insisted that Crutchley’s actions be traced back in time. We learned that in 1978, Crutchley had been the last person to see alive Debbora Fitzjohn, a secretary in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had been in his mobile home before her disappearance, and police in Fairfax were investigating whether Crutchley had any connection to her death. (No charges were brought.) We learned that wherever Crutchley had been in residence, in Pennsylvania, for instance, there were reports of missing women or bodies found in remote locations—though none of these missing-person cases have to date been connected to Crutchley.
In April of 1986, as the case was ready for trial, Crutchley decided to plead guilty to the kidnap and rape charges in exchange for the dropping of the charges stemming from the blood drinking (grievous bodily harm) and the possession of drugs. After his plea, he held a press conference to downplay what he had done. Echoing his line, his wife later suggested that the crime had been “a gentle rape, devoid of any overt brutality.”
State’s attorney Norman Wolfinger asked me to enter the case again at this stage, because the state wished to press for a more severe sentence than would normally be given to someone convicted of a first-time charge of kidnap and rape. The usual penalty was twelve to seventeen years; with time deducted for good behavior in prison and so on, Crutchley could be out in four to five years, and the state did not believe that was in society’s best interests. I agreed, and began to look into the case, prior to going to Florida to give testimony at a presentencing hearing.
I learned that Crutchley’s family was well educated. But Crutchley’s mother had dressed him as a girl until he was five or six years of age, and there were other instances of childhood abnormalities. Crutchley told a psychiatrist at the time of sentencing that he remembered seeing a psychiatric counselor in his youth. Friends and a former wife said that he liked to control people and would often make them do his bidding, and that he was a sexual sadist. Others said they knew of group sex in which he had been involved. There were indications of his bisexuality, and it was clear from interviews with some of the women named on the three-by-five-inch cards that Crutchley was into unlimited sexual experimentation. Such unlimited experimentation was one of the categories of behavior I had documented as being frequently associated with serial killers.
In June, the presentencing hearing was held, and the courtroom was packed. The blond, slight, erudite-appearing Crutchley decided to take the stand in his own defense. In a tearful two-hour presentation, he said that he was just a sexual experimenter and that the behavior for which he had been convicted was private and not within the court’s jurisdiction. Although the charge stemming from the blood drinking had been dropped from the indictment, it was an issue in the sentencing hearing, because it showed how much harm Crutchley had done to his victim. He tried to explain it away by saying that he had learned blood drinking from a nurse, fifteen years earlier, as part of a sexual ritual, and that if the drinking of blood was really important to the sentencing, it should be thrown out, because he hadn’t really drunk the blood in this case. Why not? Because it had coagulated, and he couldn’t get it down. Such answers, of course, did him very little good. Crutchley admitted that “I need treatment,” which ought not to include extended jail time. His wife sat in the courtroom but would not take the stand in his defense, though she later told reporters that he wasn’t really guilty and was just “a kinky sort of guy.”
When I took the stand, as sometimes happens, my credentials were brought into question. The defense attorney was contending that this case was so unusual that no one could claim to be an expert on things of this nature. He asked me how many blood-drinking cases I had seen. I gazed toward the ceiling for a moment and counted them in my mind before saying, “Oh, a half-dozen.”
People in the courtroom gasped. Which ones? The defense attorney challenged. I rattled them off, beginning with Richard Trenton Chase. After that demonstration of my experience, I had smooth sailing. I made a strong plea for sentencing that exceeded the guidelines. To go beyond those guidelines, the state had to provide good reasons; in this case, the reasons were that there had been extensive physical and mental injury to the victim, excessive brutality and premeditation of the crime; and taking advantage of a vulnerable victim. The presence of the video camera and other evidence, such as his family’s absence, showed that the crime had certainly been premeditated, and Crutchley’s repeated savaging of the hitchhiker even after she had lost a lot of blood demonstrated brutality and taking advantage of someone who was vulnerable. Crutchley had told the hitchhiker that he would continue to assault her again and again, and this was certainly mentally as well as physically injurious.
I further testified that John Crutchley had all the hallmarks of a serial killer, and gave my reasons for saying so—the stack of credit cards and other “trophies” I believed to have come from missing women, the unlimited sexual experimentation, the fact that the hitchhiker would have died if she had been subjected to the blood draining for another day, the Fitzjohn case in Virginia, and so on. I drew similarities between Crutchley and Ted Bundy, who was then awaiting execution and whose maneuvers to delay that execution shared headlines with the Crutchley case in Florida.
The judge did exceed the guidelines and gave Crutchley twenty-five years to life in prison, and fifty years of parole, a sentence that would keep Crutchley more or less under the state’s control for the rest of his life.
Norm Wolfinger sent a letter of thanks to Director Webster for allowing me to testify, and told me personally that had I not testified, Crutchley’s sentence might not have exceeded the guidelines. That was nice to hear, because I believe that Crutchley ought to be behind bars for a long stretch, but there are times when I wonder whether pursuing these dangerous people so assiduously is accomplishing the protection of society. With good time, law-enforcement people figure, Crutchley will be out in 1998, and maybe even sooner. In the criminal-justice system, nothing means anything anymore: Life imprisonment doesn’t mean life, death doesn’t mean death, and twenty-five years means twelve and a half, or maybe even six. But don’t get me started on that!
* * *
In October of 1989, I was preparing to retire from the Bureau, and had long since turned over the day-to-day work of profiling to others at Quantico. However, men who had worked with me in the Bureau, or whom I had taught at the academy, were all over the country, and when they called to ask for assistance, it was me personally they wanted, and I always said yes. That’s how I got involved in a case that took me back in time, both in the type of crime and in its location.
In broad daylight, on a weekday afternoon just prior to Halloween, twelve-year-old Amy Mijalevic disappeared at a small shopping center directly opposite the police station in Bay Village, Ohio. This happened right down the road from the site of the osteopathic hospital of Dr. Sam Shephard, near Cleveland; Shephard’s was the most notorious murder case of the 1950s and 1960s in the Cleveland area.
Amy’s photograph, peering out from a “missing girl” poster, could have been that of any of ten thousand twelve-ye
ar-old girls in America’s heartland, a blue-eyed, brown-haired, freckle-faced girl with outsized earrings and a turquoise jumpsuit. You looked at that photo and hoped that it was all a mistake, that she’d turn the corner and come home soon; and yet you knew there was slim chance of that.
I had been an agent in the Cleveland office of the FBI before transferring to Quantico, and so I was a former colleague of John Dunn, who became involved in the case of Amy’s disappearance. Another agent concerned with the case, Dick Wrenn, had also worked with me on a case in Genoa, Ohio, in 1980. Both men asked me to come and have a look at the evidence. I was attending a conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, held in Cincinnati, and over a weekend I drove to Bay Village.
The FBI had gotten into this case quickly, and our involvement followed the model established in the Joubert murders. I had frequently lectured about the interagency coordination that had been the key to success in that case, and the Joubert task-force model had been followed in several subsequent cases. When I arrived in Bay Village, Dunn had already established his task-force headquarters in the suburban police station, and he had two dozen agents assisting the local authorities.
Amy had been abducted, but nothing more was really certain. There had been no ransom demands, no body found, no signs of a struggle. The main witness was Amy’s younger brother, who told us that in the days prior to the abduction, Amy had received a series of telephone calls at the house from a man who the brother said had given Amy the following pitch: “I work with your mom, and she’s just been promoted and we want to get her a present; meet me in the shopping center after school and help me pick out a gift. Keep this a secret, and don’t tell anyone, because we don’t want your mom to know about the gift.”
Whoever Fights Monsters Page 20