Amy had asked whether she could tell her brother, and the man said she shouldn’t. Amy agreed, saying that her brother was a real blabbermouth. After she hung up, however, she did tell her brother, who later recounted the conversation to the authorities. Several people had seen Amy talking to a man in a car at the shopping center, and they gave partial descriptions that were made into a sketch that filled the lower part of Amy’s “missing person” poster and flier. The sketch was of a white man, fairly youthful but otherwise undistinguished in the witnesses’ minds, who might or might not have worn glasses.
Dunn, who had been a priest and a police officer before joining the FBI, sat down with me and we made a profile. If John Joubert had been on the streets, I would have suspected him, or someone quite similar to him, although Joubert killed boys and not girls. Many of the characteristics that I felt were important were similar to those of Joubert. I wanted the police to look for a man in his late twenties or early thirties who was introverted and a loner, relatively unsuccessful in life, unmarried, not overly educated but not stupid. This would be a man with no military service but with a propensity for spending a lot of time around kids. His smoothness in conning Amy into the car argued for his knowing something about children and the way their minds work, and I thought it likely that a person who preferred children’s company would not have put himself in a situation such as the military, where male bonding is part of the experience. It might just be children of both sexes he was after, but it was more likely he sought out only girls; in either case, he would be uncomfortable with male and female adults. I felt strongly that Amy’s abduction was his first offense, because there was no record of any similar abductions in the area and because the abductor had exposed himself to so much danger by his phone call and by making the abduction in such a public place as the parking lot, where many people could see him. I thought that the abductor might have conned Amy into his car, taken her to his home on the pretext of getting money or a greeting card or some such, even offered her cookies and milk, and played with her until she became frightened and started to resist, at which point he might have been convinced that he had to kill her. I told the authorities to keep an eye out for a person who might try to interject himself into the investigation.
It wasn’t much, but there was very little to go on.
In January, I returned to Bay Village, where the authorities had leads on four or five suspects who more or less fit the profile. One was a stablehand who worked at a place where Amy had taken riding lessons; I thought he was more mentally disordered than the man who had smoothly talked Amy into a car. Nonetheless, the police hauled him in and gave him truth serum; he easily passed that test. Another suspect was a police officer, and a third was a fireman. I didn’t think they fit the bill, either, because education, discipline, successful adaptation, and male bonding are essential to obtaining and keeping such jobs as they held.
A fourth suspect was a youngish man who had come to the police department and volunteered to distribute the handbills with Amy’s picture. Now many other people in the community had also volunteered, but Dunn and Wrenn had felt that this particular man was a very likely suspect. He was single, in his early thirties, lived alone, and worked as a stockboy at a discount-price club; he had graduated from high school but had no further education, and no military service. He did, however, have a very severe skin problem that caused his face to break out so badly that he was taking medication for the condition. It was thought that his skin condition prevented him from having relationships with women. In addition to volunteering, the young man had sent a sympathy card to Amy’s mother, from “a concerned friend,” and signed his name. In it were two cheap decorative pins, with a note saying that the mother could wear one and that when Amy returned home, Mrs. Mijalevic could give her daughter the other one.
I agreed with Dunn and Wrenn that this was a likely suspect, and I wanted to know where the pins had come from. We determined that they were sold in the place where the man worked.
Under the guise of trying to thank him for his volunteer work, Dunn and I went to see him. He lived in a studio apartment in an inexpensive town-house complex. The place had a fold-up bed and a tiny kitchen and bathroom. After bringing up the volunteer work, we asked him some questions about himself. Yes, he said, he had a girlfriend. We later learned that she was a woman with a small child from an early marriage. I doubted there had been any sexual activity between them.
After a while, we deliberately turned up the heat. Why was he so involved in this investigation? Was it possible that he was the one who had picked Amy up? I tried to minimize what he might have done, saying that it was possible that the child had had some difficulties, maybe fell down and hurt her head, and that he’d been afraid to tell anyone about it. Maybe there’d been an accident. He protested vehemently, saying that he had had nothing to do with Amy’s disappearance.
We had no authority to search the place, but when the man went to the bathroom, I looked it over as best I could. My focus was to see whether there was anything in the apartment that could have been a trophy of Amy or of any other child. I felt it likely that he might have killed her in this apartment and taken her elsewhere, and I had the task force prepared to move in and open the drains, take the hair out of brushes, and so on, if we got the slightest hint of involvement. There was no such hint, however, and we left the apartment.
Coming out of the interview, I told Dunn that my gut said this was the guy, and he thought so, too—but there was no proof.
Three weeks later, Amy’s body was found about fifty miles away. She still wore her turquoise jumpsuit, but it had been taken off her body and put on again after death. The dump site was a field just off an exit to I-71, the main highway that connects Cleveland with Cincinnati. Amy’s body was well preserved and had not been there very long, perhaps a week at the most. The coroner thought it likely that she had died in October and that her body had been preserved by cold until the moment of dumping.
The day that the finding of Amy’s body was reported in the newspapers, the suspect mixed dry gas in a glass of Coke and drank it, committing suicide.
As soon as the police learned of his death, Dunn and I recommended a quick search of his apartment. They obtained a warrant and went to the town-house complex, only to learn they were too late. Even before the wake, his family had already cleaned the place down to the walls and given his clothes to Goodwill.
Amy Mijalevic’s abduction and murder is still being carried on the Bay Village police books as an unsolved crime, and we will probably never know the truth of the matter. However, there have been no similar crimes in the community in the past two years, and maybe that’s all that can be hoped for.
8
STAGING: PATTERN OF DECEIT
In this chapter I’ll take you through a handful of cases that initially baffled the police because the criminals had been so clever at “staging” the crime scenes. One of the helpful consequences of our experience in profiling, and our research into the minds and criminal methods of incarcerated murderers, is extra knowledge about how some organized criminals work hard at throwing the police off their track. (A disorganized violent criminal never bothers himself about deliberately misleading the police.)
You already know about stagings from detective novels or from reports about such common occurrences as husbands who have killed their mates in a fit of anger, then tried to make the scene appear as if a burglar had come in and murdered the poor wife. The police almost always see through such stagings quickly. The cases in this chapter follow a similar pattern but are far more ingenious; indeed, in all instances, they had the regular authorities pretty much fooled—for a while.
* * *
In Columbus, Georgia, one February evening in 1978, a group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of discussion was the mysterious series of killings of seven other elderly women in Columbus. At one point during the evening, in a demonstration of how completely
the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out onto the carpet. In fact, the killings were terrible—elderly women, some of whom had been raped and all of whom had been strangled to death with nylon stockings in their own homes. Everyone was terrified of the “stocking strangler.” Some forensic evidence obtained at the crime scenes suggested that the killer was a black male, but the police had been unable to narrow the search beyond that.
There was tremendous community pressure on the Columbus police and their chief. Fortunately that chief was not the stereotypical backwoods lawman but one who had an advanced degree in police sciences. Nonetheless, he was reluctant to do as the media asked—call the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI for help—because he didn’t want to lose control of the case.
Then the chief received an unusual handwritten letter on U.S. Army stationery, addressed to him. It is reprinted (in part) just below. In the original, the capital and lowercase letters are all about the same size.
DEAR SiR:
WE ARE AN ORGiNiZATION COMPOSED OF 7 MEMBERS. I’M WRITING ThiS LETTER TO INFORM YOU THAT WE hAVE ONE OF YOUR COLuMBUS WOMEN CApTiVE. HER NAME iS GAiL JACKSON. SiNCE THAT COrONER SAid THAT THE S-STRANgLER iS BLACK, WE dECidED TO COME hERE AND Try TO CATCH hiM OR PuT MORE PrESSuRE ON YOU. I SEE NOW, MORE PrESSurE iS NEEDED. AT THiS POiNT GAiL JACKSON iS STiLL LiViNg. IF THAT STrANgLER iS NOT CAUgHT BY 1 JUNE 1978. YOU WiLL FiND GAiL JACKSON’S bODY ON WYNONTON RD. IF hE’S STILL NOT CAUGHT BY 1 SEPT 1978. THE ViTIMS WiLL doublE.… YOu hAVE uNTiL SuNDAY FOR REplY. DON’T THiNK WE ARE bluFFiNg.… WE ARE CALL THE: ForCES OF EViL.
The letter cautioned the authorities not to make too much of the fact that the letter was written on military stationery; anyone could get hold of that, the writer suggested. The message of the letter seemed to be clear: An organization of white men was going on a vigilante offensive, and black women were going to die until the black killer of the elderly white women was caught. Succeeding letters announced that the Forces of Evil had come from Chicago, and that the police chief was to communicate with the organization through radio or television messages. A demand for ten thousand dollars in order to keep Gail Jackson alive was also made. The chief at first disregarded the letters, but then he sent them to the newspapers, hoping perhaps to flush out the sender. And he also rechanneled some of his resources from going after the stocking strangler into chasing the Forces of Evil organization. He and his policemen looked hard for seven white men, even telephoning to Chicago to see what the police there knew about such a white supremacist group.
Then came a phone call to the MP desk at Fort Benning, Georgia, the large military reservation that abuts Columbus; a caller, claiming to be a representative of the Forces of Evil, said that Gail Jackson was going to be killed and asked why didn’t the police do something about it.
Two days after that phone call, at the end of March 1978, I was in Atlanta, Georgia, having dinner with an old Army CID buddy, Tom McGreevy, who had become deputy director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, for whom I was conducting a course at the Georgia Police Academy. Tom told me something about the Columbus case. He had become involved after the Columbus chief had finally realized that it was no longer in his interest to keep the state authorities at arm’s length. He showed me the Forces of Evil letters and asked whether I could help. In addition to the letters, we had available some recorded telephone calls to the MP desk.
Analyzing the communications, I immediately discounted the idea that Gail Jackson was about to be killed by a group of seven white men in reaction to the death of the seven elderly white women. The evidence pointed precisely in the opposite direction. I thought the probable culprit was a single black male. The style of writing in the letters, as well as the accent of the voice on the telephone-call tape, made that a reasonable assumption. Once I had figured that out, the rest was easy: The letters seemed quite clearly to be an attempt to lead the authorities away from the most likely suspect, a person who was a known associate of Gail Jackson’s. But what other reason would the killer have to write such a letter? Possibly to prevent the police from getting close to him, because he had already killed Jackson. It seemed likely that he had penned the letters in order to disguise the death. My analysis of the letters and the voice on the calls was seconded, independently, by the FBI’s psycholinguistic consultant, Dr. Murray Miron.
The MP desk at Fort Benning received another call on the third of April that said Gail Jackson’s body could be found “one hundred meters” from Fort Benning. A quick search did locate her body, and the information went from the base authorities to McGreevy to me. Jackson had been a prostitute, well known in some of the bars in the vicinity of the military reservation. The medical examiner estimated that she had been dead about five weeks; that is, she had been killed prior to the time the letters had been written, as I had suspected.
Now, with some more details in hand, I was able to come up with a more detailed profile. Often, the best way to approach a profile is through victimology, through looking at the victim’s background. Was this a low-risk or a high-risk victim? What areas did she frequent? What was her daily routine? What was her lifestyle? Who would she be likely to consort with in such a lifestyle? Jackson, also known by several other names, had been a black prostitute who plied her trade among the black servicemen of the large military installation at Fort Benning, and she had frequented the streets and bars near the base. I concluded that the killer was someone so close to Gail Jackson that his name or identity would inevitably be turned up in any investigation of her life, and that had been the reason for his attempt to lead the authorities 180 degrees in the opposite direction; that is, away from his own characteristics. He had chosen to portray Jackson’s abductors as seven white men from Chicago.
I pegged him as a single black male, twenty-five to thirty years of age, an enlisted man on the Fort Benning complex, possibly a military policeman or artilleryman. I was certain the killer was in the military because of the references in the letters and phone calls to “meters” and the way he kept calling automobiles “vehicles.” His inadequate English made it certain that he was not a college graduate, therefore not a commissioned officer, and I thought it likely that his rank would be no more than an E-6. As for his age, the reader already knows that most serial killers are in their twenties or thirties; I guessed he was in his late twenties because that would be commensurate with a person of modest education in a middle-ranking military position.
The latest Forces of Evil letters had mentioned the name of another black woman, Irene—whose last name the writer did not know—and said she, too, would be killed if no action was taken. I guessed that she was also already dead, and I recommended that all the phone booths on the base be kept under surveillance. They were, and the recording system was in operation, but when a call came in, the MP at the desk was so upset that he forgot to turn on the recorder. Following the instructions of the caller, authorities found a second black female, Irene Thirkield, dead on a rifle range at the fort. She, too, had been a prostitute.
Armed with my profile and the knowledge that both women had been prostitutes, GBI narcotics agents interviewed the patrons of a nightclub on the outskirts of Fort Benning frequented by black soldiers. Several people knew both prostitutes and readily named a man who had acted as their pimp. Two days after the profile was circulated, the military and civilian authorities arrested William H. Hance, a specialist fourth grade attached to an artillery unit at the fort. Confronted with the handwriting, voice evidence, and shoe prints taken at the crime scenes, Hance admitted that the letters had been a complete hoax, and confessed to the killing of the two women, who he said had been involved with him in prostitution and low-level drug trade, as well as to the killing of a third female at Fort Benning in September of the previous year. Later, he was identified as the murderer of another young black woman at another post where he had been stationed earlier, Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indian
a.
As McGreevy said in a letter of appreciation to the Director of the FBI, “The profile data turned out to be right on the nose in every respect,” and on behalf of his agency and that of the Columbus police, he expressed his gratitude to me and to the Bureau for the “wholehearted, professional and immediate efforts” that supported the investigation “when we needed all the help we could get.”
I had initially thought it likely that Hance had also committed the strangulation murders of the elderly white women, but this possibility was dismissed when the forensic evidence did not match. Released from chasing the figment of Hance’s imagination, the Columbus police and the GBI continued their investigation. Good police work finally paid off. In one of the early murders, a pistol had been stolen from the victim’s house, and later the police got a tip concerning this pistol. The weapon was traced to Kalamazoo, Michigan, then to some other cities, and ultimately to a small town in Alabama, where the man who admitted having it said it had been given to him by his nephew, Carlton Gary, who lived in Columbus. Gary, it turned out, was a black man who had killed in New York and gone to prison for his murders; then he had escaped, hidden out in South Carolina, and robbed many restaurants before returning to his place of birth. His mother had been a maid in many of the homes of the women that Gary had strangled. Gary was apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to death. He is still in prison, as is William Hance.
* * *
Just after the Forces of Evil case, the army requested that the FBI conduct training sessions for the Army in hostage negotiations, and I donned my military hat and went over to Germany to teach at the school.
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