Watching the phone paid off almost immediately. The next afternoon, agents in a van parked near the wall phone saw Gall approach and make a call. At the same time, Mr. Vine received a call at his home. The caller said, “Tonight’s the night,” and told Vine that precise instructions would follow in the evening. Agents in the van snapped photos of Gall making the call at the same time that the message was being recorded from Vine’s phone. After hanging up, Gall reached into his shirt and drew out a folded-up note, which he attached right under the phone-booth table, being careful to do so with white-gloved hands that would not leave fingerprints for the police to collect and identify.
Gall then sped away. After pursuing him for a few blocks, the agents decided not to track him farther, because he seemed to be “tail-conscious.” Anyhow, his residence was known and was also being watched. In the evening, Vine received a call telling him to go to the Woolco phone booth, where he would find further instructions. They were in the note taped under the table, and that note was the first in a series of nine that Gall had block-lettered and cached in similar places. Vine and some agents hidden in his car were taken on a several-hour chase all around the county, kept running from pay phone to pay phone, told to switch vehicles, and so on, until they were at last directed to a location where Vine was supposed to leave a suitcaseful of money and be told where to retrieve his daughter. The whole chase was watched by a Bureau aircraft and sophisticated surveillance machinery, and Vine finally left the suitcase at a remote spot near a river. It was not picked up, nor was his daughter returned; five hours after making the journey to the river, Vine retrieved the suitcase and took it home.
The cruel charade had been tolerated on the slim hope that the kidnapper still held Debra alive, but it produced nothing. This part of the hoax was mounted, it seemed, in an attempt to give Gall an alibi, since during the several-hour chase from phone booth to phone booth, Gall’s car was observed in his own driveway. That actually did not provide him with an alibi, since all the latter moves were directed by the series of nine notes, and Gall could have called the pay phones from his home number.
Though the body of Debra Sue Vine had not been found, the authorities now had ample evidence on which to indict Gall for extortion, and they did so. He was quickly convicted and sentenced. Genoa Chief of Police Garry Truman recently told me that he believes this case would have gone unsolved if the authorities had not had my profile and the assistance of the FBI. The police pursued Gall for murder, especially after the victim’s body was eventually found. Debra’s body was discovered in a deserted location near to Genoa but opposite from where the “X marks the spot” site had been indicated on the phony map. The body was wrapped in an electric blanket, and there was hope that this blanket could be identified as one stolen in the Michigan burglary for which Gall had once been charged. As of this writing, the murder charge has not been brought, but Gall is still incarcerated for extortion.
* * *
The veneer of incomprehensibility in a crime scene not only covers the evidence in the cases of violent murder and rape that make up the bulk of this chapter but also in cases that are far less bloody, far more common, and seldom make the headlines. One such interesting crime scene became a recent assignment for me in 1991, months after I’d retired from the FBI.
A psychologist in a major city on the West Coast had been retained by an insurance company to evaluate a claim of $270,000 for damages to a home, damages apparently caused by vandals. Faced with a crime scene that was difficult to assess, the psychologist wanted me to evaluate it and to do a profile of the likely offender or offenders.
I was a good choice, because in thirty years of law-enforcement work, I’d seen hundreds of vandalism scenes on military bases and installations, government buildings, private property—virtually every sort of place that could be hit by vandals. The psychologist planned to send me color photos of the scene, the police reports on the incident, and his comments on the matter. I told him to go ahead and send the photos and police reports but to hold back his own comments until I’d made my evaluation. That was the procedure we’d followed for years in the FBI. In an attempt to give an independent opinion, we’d try not to look at anyone else’s conclusions before making our own evaluation. We’d routinely ask police departments seeking our help to send us only firsthand reports and photos. If they insisted on shipping their conclusions anyway, we’d ask to have them sent in a separate and sealed envelope, and once we received that envelope, we’d put it aside until after we’d made our own judgments. Any other way of working would have prejudiced independent examination of the evidence.
A few days after my conversation with the psychologist, a packet of photos and police reports arrived in the mail, and I spread them out on a desk and began to peruse them. There were dozens of photos of a single home that was in a complete mess. At one time, it had been a lovely suburban house, but it had been trashed, apparently by vandals. The owners were seeking more than a quarter of a million dollars from the insurer. That was a sum large enough to prod the insurer to obtain some outside opinions on the damage.
Peering at the photos and reading the police reports, most observers would see at first glance that the home had been overturned and was in total chaos, with spray-painted graffiti, upended and broken valuables, smashed doorjambs. Damage was spread through the living room, halls, kitchen, main bedroom, and bath. Walls, furniture, paintings, clothing, vases, jade carvings, and other items had been broken and defaced. Curtains were down. Glass over art prints had been cracked. Spray-paint graffiti could be made out in various locations, on walls, furniture, and the like, in single-word clusters, such as “Asshole,” “Ass,” “Suck,” “Cunt.” There was also a two-word inscription: “Fuck Me.”
You may have seen such a scene yourself, though probably not in real life; more likely, you saw it in a film or on a television show, with the damage attributed to teenage males, misunderstood rebels who were “acting out” their aggression against society. It’s a familiar fictional theme.
These photos didn’t show me that, however. First glances can be deceiving. The vandalism wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be, and certainly didn’t reflect what I knew about teenage male offenders. Vandals usually travel in groups—packs, if you like—composed of a strong leader and several inadequate and subordinate followers who take their cues from the leader. Sometimes a vandal is a single individual, a lone, antisocial adolescent male whose act is a deliberate lashing out at society at large, or against an authority figure known to him. Damage from such vandals is usually random, indiscriminate, and accompanied by obscene writings and sometimes by obscene acts performed at the location of the vandalism. The graffiti in particular will reflect the interests and lifestyle of the vandal or vandals; in most cases of adolescent male vandals, these graffiti will have to do with musical groups, or will incorporate symbols of satanic or occult origin, such as pentagrams or inverted crosses—iconography and music that we often find to have attracted the focus of emotionally unfulfilled youth. Occasionally, in conjunction with such graffiti, we’ll find that sexual acts have been carried out at the scene, acts that reflect the vandal’s state of mind in that place. He feels he has total freedom of action in the arena he is trashing, that he is entitled to take women’s undergarments and masturbate in them, or defecate on the rug or urinate in a closet. Theft of items is common, and food and alcohol belonging to the owner of the site are usually consumed right there and then—actions that also reflect the vandal’s feelings of entitlement. As a matter of course in the usual teenage male vandalism act, damage is total and few items of value or endearment survive.
These photos, however, showed me a different pattern of vandalism. The destruction was not total, but selective. Some of the paintings were damaged, yes, but in some instances only the canvases were damaged and the ornate frames were left intact. The real damage was to paintings that did not seem particularly valuable. Some Indian art prints—objects whose value I happene
d to know about—were damaged in an interesting way: The glass over the prints was broken, but the prints underneath were left unharmed. The most intriguing lack of damage was to a large oil painting of a little girl; it was left untouched. Certain vases, statues, and jade carvings seemed to have been tipped over onto the floor with some care, and none appeared to have been broken. The usual teenage vandal would not have left such art objects intact. Moreover, an entire shelf of plants had not been touched.
Although the kitchen and the bathroom were extensively trashed, there had been no real damage to countertops, mirrors, appliances, or fixtures. Doorknobs had been damaged, but not the doors themselves. Other than some minor ceiling damage, no wallboards had been kicked or knocked out; such kicking is a favorite act of adolescent male vandals. A curtain rod seemed to have been placed gently down on the floor without harming or wrinkling the curtains on it. Some clothing had been damaged, but the torn items did not appear to be particularly stylish or valuable. Was it possible that the vandals had missed virtually all of the expensive or sentimentally important items?
The spray painting was also incomplete and inconsistent with the acts of true vandals. It seemed to have been directed at locations that could be easily cleaned, painted over, or—in the case of furniture—reupholstered. The pattern of the spraying went around art objects and the more delicate valuables. No fetish sex acts had taken place in this particular vandalized suburban home.
Finally, there was the graffiti. Single-word obscenities are not common to the usual teenage vandal; today’s young trashers are more apt to leave slogans and names of musical groups, such as Slayer, Motley Crue, Public Enemy, or Terminator X. Among the specific terms used by the spray-painter was Cunt, and in teenage usage, this term has been replaced by Pussy. Last of all, and especially meaningful, I thought, was the inscription “Fuck Me.” “Fuck You” would have been more typical of a hostile and arrogant young male. But “Fuck Me”?
Taking all these factors into consideration, I wrote up a profile of the probable offender.
I specifically rejected the idea that the vandals had been a group of adolescent males. The vandalism was too benign, too carefully done. All the clues pointed away from a group of males and toward a different possible perpetrator. The author of this damage and destruction, I said, was a lone white female, over forty and less than fifty years of age; specifically, someone who had no current familiarity with teenagers. She would be an extremely narcissistic woman and intimately involved with the items and the collectibles that were passed over in the vandalizing of the house. I postulated that she would be a woman who had difficulty with interpersonal relationships, someone who had been through several divorces during her lifetime. I theorized that she would be a close family member of the owner or renter, and that she had a vested interest in making the acts of violence selective, so that she would not wipe out items that she deemed to be irreplaceable.
This woman, I guessed, had staged the vandalism to make it look like her conception of a typical act of male adolescents. Her attempts at reproducing youthful graffiti dated her and revealed her sex and age. No young male vandal would write “Fuck Me.” This was a middle-aged and rather confused woman at work. She was probably not comfortable with the use of foul language, and the inscribed words reflected her notion of what she fantasized male hostility and antisocial behavior were all about. In contemporary terms, however, her choice of obscenities seemed childlike.
If she had any children, I wrote, these would probably not include a teenager, and not a boy. I thought it likely she was the mother of only one child, a daughter, and that the daughter did not currently reside with her. My reason for this (aside from her lack of familiarity with teenagers and male children in general) was the presence of the oil painting of the young girl in the home, and the fact that it was undamaged; such an icon usually suggests an absent but favored relative.
I thought that there had been a specific triggering event for this behavior on her part, that the perpetrator was probably responding to stressful events that had occurred days or at most weeks before the act of vandalism. There could have been, I said, a matter of money, or of men, the loss of a job, or something that caused her immediate future to appear uncertain.
Summing up, I said that the motivation for the vandalism was one or a combination of three factors. An angry woman committed the act of vandalism to retaliate against a family member. Looking for attention, this woman transformed her act into the sort of false allegation that we often see in trumped-up rape cases. The woman sought insurance money because she had undertaken improvements or renovations to the place and could no longer afford the renovations that she had ordered previously.
I put these conclusions and the reasoning behind them down on paper for the West Coast psychologist and sent my findings to him. After he read my document, he called to tell me that the profile described almost perfectly the owner of the home, the woman who had reported the damages to the police and had made the claim for insurance money. White and in her forties, she had broken up with her boyfriend, had money problems, had a daughter who lived with her former husband, and matched in many other details the personality I had postulated. The psychologist was rather amazed at my perspicacity. I wasn’t. Compared to the profiles of unknown, vicious, antisocial criminals that I had struggled to compile and make accurate over the past seventeen years in the FBI, this attempt at puzzle solving was kid stuff.
9
TO KILL AGAIN?
Police officer Kilburn McCoy looked like a cowboy, with Clint Eastwood–type good looks, and both he and his police officer wife, Janet, were attending a class I was teaching at an academy near Salem, Oregon, in 1980. At the end of the week, McCoy asked me to go down to his police station and look at the files on a murder committed in 1975 by a Vietnam veteran named Duane Samples, who was now in prison. McCoy thought Samples would be an excellent addition to the murderers we were interviewing for the Criminal Personality Research Project, because even though Samples was not a serial murderer—he had been convicted of killing just one person—he was articulate, a college graduate with a degree in psychology, and seemed to have the sort of overwhelming violent fantasies characteristic of serial killers.
Samples’s crime had taken place during one terrible night in the small town of Silverton, Oregon, on December 9, 1975. Fran Steffens, her eighteen-month-old daughter, and her friend Diane Ross were in Fran’s apartment, and a casual acquaintance, Duane Samples, came over for some beer, marijuana, and conversation. Samples was a counselor in a local drug clinic, a Vietnam vet in his early thirties who had knocked around quite a bit and had had fleeting relationships with several women in the area. He was interested in Fran, but his interest was not really reciprocated, though Fran did not send him away. As the evening wore on, the women became tired. Fran went to bed alongside her daughter, and Diane sat on the couch, listening to Samples. He was boring her stiff with his stories of Vietnam, and she finally told him that she was tired and that he ought to leave.
Samples left. Diane drifted off to sleep on the couch, then woke up to a strange, warm, sticky feeling—and discovered she had been cut severely: on the throat, across her body under her breasts, and from the navel upward. Two feet of her intestines were hanging out. It wasn’t even the cuts that had awakened her; it was Fran’s screams as she was being dragged into the bedroom by a knife-wielding Samples. Diane somehow held her arms around her torso and ran out the door. With two hands wrapping her gut, she couldn’t hold up her pants, which had also been cut. She stepped out of them and stumbled down the block and into a neighbor’s house, through the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she told them, “I’ve been cut. Call a doctor; I’m dying.” She worked hard at not giving in and falling asleep, thinking that she would die if she did. When the ambulance came, she heard someone say, “No need to hurry. She won’t make it.”
However, they did hurry and Diane Ross did make it. She remained alive, and was able to tell the po
lice that Duane Samples was killing Fran Steffens.
The police rushed over to Fran’s residence but found Fran already dead, cut in a similar manner to Diane, around the neck and on the torso, blood and intestines spilled out over the bed she shared with her daughter, who managed to sleep through and escape Samples’s slaughter. Blood was smeared on Fran’s thighs, evidence of postmortem attack on the body. There were also defensive wounds on the hands, showing that Fran had attempted to fight off her attacker.
Samples was actually well known to the police in the area, principally through his counseling work, but also because he even played softball with some of the cops. An all-points bulletin alerted a pair of officers, who drove to the apartment Samples shared with two other men in a nearby town: he wasn’t there, but they found him shortly, and he surrendered peaceably. In his pocket, the police found a handwritten note to Fran dated “Mon. Dec 8” in which he asked her to show the letter to the police so that she could be exonerated from killing him. It said that he “set forth to threaten Fran w/her life” unless she did as he instructed her, “eviscerates & emasculates me.” She was instructed either to do this, or he would “gut & mutilate her & her kid.” The note went on to say that being killed by a beautiful woman was a “life long fantasy come true,” and that a part of him could “hardly wait to see” the blade cutting “murderously” into him.
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