The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  It seems to me that, in their own different ways, both Annabel and Victoria, from completely opposite walks of life, whatever their motives, contributed something unique to the study of criminology.

  Victoria Redstall makes this quite chilling observation: Annabel and I each got a different side of this guy. Each of us found the Bobby Joe Long we would have met outside of prison walls. Maybe he would not have killed me, but I would hazard a guess that Annabel might have met a different fate.

  Of course, not all of Long’s victims were pole dancers, prostitutes, or murder groupies, far from it, for this is a man who would scan newspaper want ads looking for perfectly decent women, alone at home, whom he could brutally rape and abuse. So, without wishing to take issue with Victoria on her observation, what might have happened to her had she placed an ad for furniture in a local newspaper and Long had knocked on her door?

  Whatever the case, Victoria and Annabel found the same Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde entity living in the head of another serial killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson. Victoria, who is researching the life and crimes of Jesperson for a TV series pilot, found the “decent” Keith, while Annabel, who wrote sleazy stuff to him while flaunting her kinky sex and photographs of her scantily dressed body, brought out the perverted side of this man. The question is, however, which of these entities is the real Keith Jesperson, or is he a mix of the two? But more of Keith later.

  So, we have good reason to wonder about Bobby Joe Long. Dubbed by the media as the Classified Ad Rapist, Bobby Joe has good reason to wonder about himself, too. Wonder, perhaps, about the long road he traveled, which will result in him hitting a stop sign in the form of his execution by lethal injection. Long’s twisted character is rife with the kind of paradoxes that can frustrate introspection. Here is a man who had chosen a life that required the discipline of a professional serial killer. He was a human predator, and like a heat-seeking missile, he zeroed in on his targets with pinpoint accuracy, raining down death and destruction again and again.

  So who was Bobby Joe Long, and where did he come from?

  By all accounts, the founding fathers who named the settlement of Kenova, West Virginia in 1869, were an imaginative bunch, for owing to their unique position between Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, they doodled a little, supped some more moonshine, shouted “Eureka!” and, with an ink-dipped quill, penned “Kenova!”

  Born October 14, 1953, in Kenova City, Wayne County, in the Mountain State, to an abusive prostitute mother, Bobby Joe went on to commit some 50 rapes and 10 murders in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. All of the women were killed during an eight-month period in 1984. Nevertheless, we begin Bobby Joe’s story in 1966.

  I’d look after you, babe, probably in ways you’ve never really imagined being taken care of sweetheart!

  —BOBBY JOE LONG LETTER TO ANNABEL LEIGH

  Bobby Joe Long and a girl known to us only as Cathy were just 13 years old when they first met. Drawn to each other because they’d both come from broken homes, they became inseparable. For the first time in his life, Long writes in correspondence, he “felt wanted.” He says that he had met someone with whom he could share the shameful stories of his flimsily dressed barmaid mother bringing home men, and of the rage he felt toward her. Bobby and Cathy dated for six years before marrying in January 1974.

  Long told this author that at age 15 he started work as an “electrician’s helper, working in the Miami summer heat, basically at slave labor, ditch-digger, pipe-bender-threader, wire-puller, and gofer.” By the time he was 17, he says, he was running his own electrical service truck and employing a helper.

  At age 21, we find Bobby Joe stationed at the Homestead Air Force Base, Miami, Florida. There, he says, he was in “fire control for 90 MIM-14 Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missiles in the Air Defense Artillery.” Then a motorcycle accident changed his life forever. His machine was struck by a car, and he sustained severe injuries, including a serious blow to his head. And, this was not his first head injury; he had already suffered multiple traumas caused by his abusive mother during his childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, the motorcycle accident threatened him with the loss of a leg, a fate he narrowly missed. Nevertheless, the entire episode transformed Bobby Joe in a way that would wreck not only his world but the lives of others. His victims, their families, indeed an entire community would suffer at the hands of Bobby Joe Long.

  Discharged from the army, unemployed Long found himself plagued by an increased and insatiable sex drive. He would masturbate five or six times a day. The thought of sex consumed him, and it was then that he devised the idea of using classified newspaper ads to locate women, turn up on their doorsteps, and rape them. It is claimed by those who have researched Long’s case that he went on to commit about 50 rapes in total. Although the true number of rapes may never be known, his MO was soon tried, tested, and well established.

  Long started making a large number of telephone calls to people who had placed classified ads. In particular, he was pretending to seek bedroom furniture, which Long later explained was because one would have to try it out before purchase. He also targeted properties that bore “For Sale” signs, often forcing his way in when the door was shut in his face and committing rape. A few times, he attacked girls as young as 12 and 13.

  After he found an advertisement that suited his purpose, Long would telephone and arrange to look at the piece of furniture during the day, at a time when husbands or boyfriends would most likely be at work. If a man was at home, he could always decline to buy the item and walk away. More often than not, women on their own answered the door, and they often let him in because he came across as a clean-cut, well-dressed, respectable young guy.

  Bobby Joe fine-tuned his MO in neighborhoods surrounding Ocala, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. When a woman opened the door and appeared to be alone, Bobby Joe would pull his knife and bind and rape his victim, often robbing her before he fled.

  Years later, Long said, “A few of them got into it, and they even asked me if I minded if they enjoy it [the rape].” He went on to add that while he raped them, he made them talk to him. Most did not resist, he claimed, but those who did received a punch in the stomach that showed that he meant business. “Give a bitch a choice between getting dicked and getting hurt,” he said, “you know what she’s gonna pick.”

  In his warped opinion, Bobby Joe said that he was, “doing them a favor because they lived such miserable sex lives with their husbands.” The fact that he had had no previous contact or knowledge of his victims’ social and domestic lives before he saw their newspaper advertisements had not crossed his mind, or so he would have us believe. Indeed, after his arrest Long claimed that had he not started to kill, he could have kept up his rapist activity indefinitely. To him, it seemed a foolproof MO, and he got a kick out of reading newspaper accounts that labeled the mysterious man as the “Classified Ad Rapist” or the “Adman Rapist.”

  In a letter to Victoria Redstall (the grammatical errors are all his), he says:Of course there’s been women in my life I’ve “respected,” and, even liked!! Don’t know where people got the quote where I’m supposed to have said that, “All American women are whores/sluts” . . . because I don’t think that. Never have. Just been my bad luck, I’ve run into more than my share. And crazy to boot!

  I done some bad things in my life. Hurt a lot of people. I admit it. I have no reason to lie. Can I tell you, early on, I’ve had 3 crazy cunts try to set me up for rape? That’s just how my “luck” with females has gone. So, because they got a little more than they bargained for . . . “WAAAH! He raped me!!” Well, 2 of ’em did that to me. The 3red was just a crazy bitch, mad because when I was stupid enough to move in with her, I took off after 3 weeks! That one tried to set me up, good! Miserable cunt! Too bad I got locked up. Always meant to track her down, years later, and explain how I really felt about that.

  Although he was still married to Cathy, priapic Bobby Joe started sharing a house with a woman named Sh
aron Richards. Of her we know literally nothing except to suggest that this seems to have been a mutually agreeable, volatile, booze-fueled relationship—one, as any sensible person might envisage, destined to end in failure.

  In October 1981, Sharon accused Bobby Joe of rape. The police, however, did not have enough evidence to press charges. Two weeks passed, and then she alleged that he hit her during another drunken argument. The police were called again. This time 28-year-old Long was arrested. He bonded out to stay with his parents in Kenova, a city on a spit at the confluence of the Ohio and Big Sandy Rivers.

  In June 1983, Bobby Joe returned to Florida, where he took up work as an X-ray technician at the Humana Women’s Hospital in Tampa. Around that time, he also claims to have “got a Degree in Diagnostic Radiologic Technology . . . got Certified as an Air/Mixed Gas, Bell/Saturation Commercial Diver, etc.... then got a P.A.D.I. Certification, and a job as a dive instructor on a cruise ship,” which he says was his “best job ever.”

  Bobby Joe Long refers to Baja, Mexico, as being “pretty damn nice commercial diving,” adding, “I was diving along the Pacific Coast off Southern California and Baja, Mexico.” He says that it was, “basically, hard, manual labor underwater, very deep at 1,600 ft maximum, breathing a Heliox gas, wearing a hard helmet, diving bells, etc.”

  After hearing all this from Bobby Long, one might be forgiven for thinking that he is telling fairy tales, but it seems that he is telling some truth, for this author spoke to one of the UK’s top divers, who says that, apart from the depth of 1,600 feet, Long could not have invented his diving experience.

  A friend of the late John Bennett, who still holds the world record at 308 meters (about 1,010 feet), my source confirmed that perhaps Long’s exaggerated depth as a PADI-certified (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) diver is 100 meters (328 feet) too deep, and he could never have survived.11 In fact, 1,600 feet can only be reached by full-saturation divers, and Bobby Joe Long makes no mention of being certified in this profession at all, where the world record is held at 1,752 feet.

  Bobby Joe relocated to Florida, were he met a woman named Emma. They started courting. Emma, a religious Bible-thumper, encouraged him to attend church. For his part she seemed ideal, and he was soon showering her with the jewelry he had stolen from his rape victims. Of course, Emma knew nothing of her lover’s criminal activity, so it must have come as a devastating blow to her when he revealed that he had to attend court on sexual assault charges stemming from the 1981 incident involving Sharon Richards. He was found guilty and given a suspended sentence.

  Bobby Joe was furious at the guilty verdict. He reasoned that it took two to tango and that at least half the blame for the assault on Sharon Richards lay with her. And to give him his due, it has to be said that Sharon was indeed a feisty character, with or without drink inside her. Further, it was also commonly known that she packed a pretty solid punch, as testified by many a local man whom she had displaced from the vertical position to the horizontal in the blink of an eye.

  So we find Mr. Long seething with rage and writing lengthy letters to the judge demanding a new trial. But Bobby Joe came unstuck again when, in November 1983, he was charged with sending an obscene letter and equally obscene photographs to a 12-year-old girl in Tampa. Officials had also traced phone calls Long had made to the girl, and he received a sentence of two days in jail with six months’ probation.12

  On Tuesday, March 6, 1984, Bobby Joe broke into a woman’s home and raped her at gunpoint. For these offenses he would, on June 17, 1985, receive four 99-year sentences. However, during the interim period on bail, Sunday, March 11, 1984, he was found again attempting to kidnap a woman in her Jaguar car at the point of a pistol. Valiantly, she outsmarted him by deliberately crashing her vehicle.

  After being arrested and scheduled to face charges in July, he made bail yet again, and it was at this point that Bobby Joe decided any future victims would not be allowed to live long enough to level accusations against him.

  Artis Wick

  Tuesday, March 27, 1984 was the day Bobby Joe Long made a transformation. It was the date from which he could never turn back, for it was the day he picked up 20-year-old Artis Wick in Tampa. After raping her, he found himself “strangely unsatisfied.” Rather than let her go free, as he had his other victims, he strangled her to death.

  Artis Wick’s skeletonized remains were found in a rural area on Thursday, November 22, 1984. Long was never charged, much less convicted, of this crime.

  Ngeun Thi Long

  Bobby Joe now believed that he had discovered the perfect method to guarantee he would not get caught for his crimes. On Thursday, May 10, 1984, while working as an electrician, he spotted a petite young woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, wearing shorts and a tank top, as she strolled along North Nebraska Avenue in Tampa.

  Ngeun Thi Long, aka “Lana Long,” was a 20-year-old Laotian who worked as an exotic dancer at the Sly Fox Lounge nearby. She normally worked the evening shift and was a known alcohol and drug user. It is believed that Bobby Joe had visited the club that evening and spoken to her. She was desperate to earn money to return to California, and it is believed that she approached Bobby Joe asking for cash. Whatever the case, he stopped his car and offered her a lift. She accepted, and only moments later, her ride turned into a trip to hell.

  Driving to a wooded area off North 22nd Street, Bobby Joe pulled over, ordered Lana to strip naked and forced her to lie face down on the front seat. Then he tied her hands behind her back. With the woman unable to move and too terrified to cry out, he drove 25 miles along Route 301 to Symmes Road, then onto East Bay Road, where at the end of a track he turned into a field and raped her. After a desperate but futile fight for her life, she died with a rope knotted around her neck. He dumped the body where she had expired and fled the scene.

  Late in the afternoon of Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 12, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s officers Captain Garry Terry and Detective Lee Baker responded to a report of a body being found. Two boys had discovered the deceased female lying face down and infested with maggots. A white silk cloth was found under her face, apparently used as a gag. Her hands had been loosely tied with rope, about eight inches apart, behind her back, and a different type of rope, approximately 14 inches in length, had been wrapped three times, leash-fashion, around her neck. The victim’s legs were spread five feet apart—wider than she was tall. Her killer had cruelly broken them at the hips to allow them to be pulled out at right angles to the body. There was also a large gash in her head. The only other physical clues were tire impressions—three of which were different tread patterns—and some red Triobal Bright fibers, probably from the seat of a vehicle.

  At autopsy, Medical Examiner Charles Digg determined that she had died as the result of strangulation. She had also been raped.

  Michelle Denise Simms

  Two weeks later, at approximately 11:30 a.m., on Sunday, May 27, 1984, the naked body of a young, attractive, dark-haired, white female was discovered by a construction worker in East Park Circle—a lovers’ lane some six miles from where she had been picked up by Bobby Joe Long. Apart from a green T-shirt, which had been pulled up in front and back, the remainder of her clothing (a bloodstained white jumper and white panty hose) was found hanging in a tree near the body. She lay on her back with her hands loosely bound at the waist. There was a hangman’s noose, again leash-fashion, around the neck. Her cheeks had been slashed. Her throat had been cut in a massive wound almost 12 inches long. She had sustained multiple trauma injuries to the head.

  At the crime scene, detectives found a single red Triobal Bright fiber near her left breast. There were several strands of hair on her stomach and under her right hand. Other evidence wasa bare footprint in the soil, and tire tracks—one of which was a Vogue, an expensive tire made exclusively for Cadillac. The right rear tire was determined to be a Goodyear Viva with the whitewall facing inward. These matched exactly the tire impressions found at the first
murder scene. Therefore, combined with the rest of the evidence, it was enough to suggest to police that the same man had murdered both Ngeun “Lana” Thi Long and this unidentified victim. Moreover, officials now had a Caucasian hair and semen stains showing the presence of both H and B blood substances. They were not hairs from the victim.

  At autopsy, it was estimated that this woman, who was probably in her late teens, stood 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 119 pounds. She had been dead for about 12 hours. Having suffered five brutal blows to the head, she had been raped, stabbed, slashed across the cheeks, then strangled.

  As the victim was unidentified, a composite drawing of her face was released to the media. She was identified as 22-year-old Michelle Denise Simms, a former California beauty pageant contestant who had turned to prostitution to support her $1,000-a-week cocaine habit. Ironically, Simms had only been in Tampa a couple days. She had last been seen alive about 24 hours earlier, talking with two white males near Kennedy Boulevard, a known hangout for hookers, seven miles due south from where Ngeun Thi Long had been abducted.

  Bobby Long would later tell police that he’d hit Michelle over the head after an unsuccessful attempt at strangling her because he didn’t want her to “suffer when I stabbed her.”

  To maximize efforts to catch the killer, all of the evidential information was shared with other law enforcement agencies. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office sent a detailed description of the crimes to the FBI Behavioral Science Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, for an analysis of the murders, and they requested a detailed profile of the killer.

  As former FBI Agent Robert Ressler states in his excellent book, Whoever Fights Monsters, “Profilers don’t catch killers, cops on the beat do,” but it is also true that offender profiles are investigative tools that can narrow the search for a killer.