The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  “Detective Onheiser, please pick up your phone . . . Detective Onheiser, your phone, please.”

  The cop picked up the handset. “Yeah and no!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. There was a pause before, “Whaddaya think I am . . . a fuckin’ crystal ball?” followed with, “Me and Bob are working this shit night an’ fuckin’ day. You need a comment, then go through the proper channels . . .” another pause, then, “. . . go give Public Relations a pain in the ass.”

  Gerry Onheiser slammed the radio down and angrily returned to Clyde. For the record, Clyde was a permanent fixture on Gerry’s desk. Clyde was also a legend in homicide: a decade past retirement date, the battered IBM Selectric golf-ball machine should have been consigned to a dumpster years back, but budget restrictions on purchasing new equipment kept Clyde alive.

  Next the phone on Parrish’s desk rang, a red light on the handset blinking red. The officer turned away from the window, popped a mint into his mouth, and answered it. Making a few notes and recording the time, he replied, now looking at his buddy:

  “Okay. Yeah . . . I got southeast corner of Ola and West Indiana . . . black female. I need CSI down there now, and keep the uniforms outta my crime scene.”

  Ronald Denney had been out on his early morning jog, which daily took him down North Ola Avenue, through the wrought iron, Gothic-style gates of the Old Centro Asturiano Cemetery, along a couple of gravel paths, and out onto West Indiana Avenue. On this day, in the southeast corner of this mist-shrouded marble town, in a field bordered on one side by a tree line, Ron had the shock of his life, for he discovered the nude, dead body of a black woman. It wasn’t six feet under, but lay about three yards from the cemetery fence. Ron called the police.

  Parrish and Onheiser didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to figure this one out. A sightless cop with no sense of taste or smell could tell that the naked corpse was a black female. Her fingers had long, well-manicured nails, painted crimson; on one finger was a yellow metal ring with a glassy rock.

  Detective Parrish reported:We found no signs of cutting or stabbing or anything like that. But she did have a fine mist of blood on her right side, which appeared to come from her navel area. This indicated that she’d died in the cemetery from blunt trauma or by asphyxiation.

  Based on the condition of the body, it appeared that she had been murdered less than 12 hours earlier, giving the killer more than enough time to flee. From his experience, Parrish knew that this would be a difficult case to solve.

  As the victim was being photographed, the investigators noticed that she was barefoot, and oddly, the soles of her feet were clean. The ground was moist, and unless she had levitated across the graveyard, she could not have walked to this position; moreover, there was no evidence to indicate that she had been dragged.

  The dead woman’s personal effects were scattered all over the area. Each item, including her panties, top, a wig, and a pair of shoes, was bagged and tagged as potential evidence. There were also empty beer bottles and a cigarette pack, but there was no purse or driver’s license to identify her.

  Not far from the body, the cops found fresh tire tracks in the dirt, so Parrish surmised that the woman had been killed someplace else, then dumped in the cemetery. A large vehicle, maybe a truck or an SUV, had made the tracks, so evidence technicians made casts of the imprints.

  “Where is this witness?” Parrish snapped impatiently.

  A uniform pointed to a scrawny little guy with a face the color of asparagus. “Over there,” said the patrolman. “Yo!” shouted Parrish.“Yo, there.” He waved the man over. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Ronald Denney.”

  “Okay, Ron, whad’ja see?”

  “I was just jogging by. Ya know. I was just running, see.”

  “What else?”

  Denney removed his baseball cap and scratched his head, which was smooth and shiny, the style of a balding man who’d decided it was easier to shave what hair he had left than comb it. Parrish looked down at his own shiny, now soaked shoes, then at the jogger, noticing that the guy’s hands were shaking real bad, and they, like the zipper area of his pants, were wet.

  “I jog every day . . . same time . . . same route . . . never see anyone.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I was jogging by, and I see this fuckin’ body there. An’ I ran some more, an’ stuff. Holy Shit, man, ya know. Then I thinks, ‘Holy Shit! That was a dead body back there.’ So I calls the po-lice. I reckon I done you a favor.”

  After giving his details to a patrolman, Denney was allowed to go on his way. Then, after processing the scene, officers led by Sergeant Price canvassed the neighborhood hoping that someone might have seen or heard something the previous night. Nobody had.

  The morgue is a human warehouse storing perishable, out-of-sell-by-date goods. The stuff is unpacked, signed for, examined, chilled, made ready for disposal, and then trashed. The staff are shippers and packers of human remains consigned on a one-way ticket to ashes or a hole in the ground.

  A body deposit entails completing the “Body Log” Form 6B Information Sheet: four pages in quadruplicate with a case number describing name and address (if known), time of arrival, source of discovery, method of conveyance, approximate age and weight, body temperature on arrival, hair and eye color, race or ethnic origin, details of external trauma (if any), and clothing/personal effects (if available), itemized. The four copies of the Log are distributed as follows:Copy (1): onto the morgue supervisor’s or medical examiner’s metal desk.

  Copy (2): into a battered green filing cabinet marked “Disposals—City/Private (delete where applicable).” It has to be one or the other—a cardboard coffin in a pauper’s grave in the city bone yard or a silk-lined $5,000 casket with all the fancy furniture, flowers, plot, and a headstone; or the crematorium.

  Copy (3): into a buff envelope rubber-stamped “URGENT—Hospital Records Only”—then fired up a tube to the 15th floor.

  Copy (4): law enforcement (when applicable).

  Life reduced to 16 sheets of paper that yellow with time and, like the ink, slowly fade away. That’s it. What more do Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public need to know, except that the warehouses around Tampa were getting busier than they had a right to be—a serial killer was off of his leash.

  At autopsy, associate medical examiner Dr. Lee Miller, reported on the Jane Doe recovered from the cemetery:Deceased is black female. She is 5’ 8” tall, weighs 120 pounds, and is about 30 to 35 years old. Her cause of death was strangulation. She has scratches on both sides of her neck, and a fractured hyoid bone. Pinpoint hemorrhages, characteristics of strangulation, are found in the whites of her eyes. The only other injuries are a slightly scraped bruise over the right eye and a set of narrow abrasions around the wrists, indicating that the wrists had been tied. There are two lines across the back of each wrist from one side to the other side, about a third of an inch wide, with a loop on top of one hand. No marks are to be found on the inside of the wrists.

  Dr. Miller found evidence of a nosebleed, which is often present in cases of strangulation. A blood test showed evidence of alcohol. Bowel contents were found over the woman’s anus and vaginal area. Dr. Miller took vaginal swabs but did not see any sperm cells. Her vaginal exam did reveal a “wadded-up piece of paper.” The inner two-thirds of the vagina was “lined with an unidentified while cheesy substance.”

  Based on the amount of rigor mortis and insect activity, it was confirmed that Jane Doe had been murdered less than 12 hours before discovery. Among other intimate body samples, strands of the woman’s hair were collected, and if a suspect emerged, it was possible that some of her hair might be found in a vehicle, or on or about the suspect’s person.

  Identifying the dead woman became the detectives’ next priority. Her fingerprints were taken and run through the Tampa Police database. Within hours Parrish found a match—Jane Doe was 34-year-old Areba Smith.

  Detective Parrish said, “After I confir
med her identity, I contacted her mom and got as much information as I could about her and her habits, who she was seeing, and any steady boyfriend.”

  From Areba’s mother, Parrish learned that Areba had been a pretty girl with a ready smile and bubbly personality. She had been outgoing until the lure of crack cocaine had reduced her to a life of painful addiction and cranked her once-full figure down to very thin. To pay for her habit, Areba had turned to hooking.

  Detective Parrish continued: “There were four different bars in what we call the West Tampa area that Areba frequented, and as the principal investigator I had to go to these bars, find out who she knew and just do some good legwork. I found out that everyone spoke very highly of her. All the people I interviewed said she was a very good girl, and a very good individual.”

  Areba’s life on the streets had placed her in contact with a lot of unsavory characters, but no one the police talked to could point to a suspect in her murder.

  Detective Parrish had hit a dead end, so he started looking for clues in other unsolved homicide cases, not only in Tampa, but also in Hillsborough County and nearby cities.

  It took Parrish a week to review two years’ worth of homicides, looking for similarities, and, in the end, he was stunned by what he found. Other detectives had been working on reports of previous murders, and similar types of victims. Other jurisdictions had African American females, all prostitutes, their bodies found naked in cemeteries. Lavinia Palmore Clark, Joyce Madison, Shelley Wate, Glenda Trotter, Shirley Mason, and Shania Simons had been strangled, and all had ligature marks around their wrists.

  Lavinia Palmore Clark

  On December 12, 1985, the naked body of 28-year-old black prostitute Lavinia Palmore Clark had been found on the north side of Idlewild Avenue. The corpse was on the shoulder of the road, adjacent to the Shady Lawn Cemetery. It lay about 25 to 30 yards from the nearest tombstone.

  With this collation of information, Tampa detectives and investigators from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office pooled their resources. Even considering Tampa’s high homicide stats, things were getting out of hand. Along with other agencies in the area, they formed a task force to find and stop a killer. However, the lack of physical evidence found at the crime scenes, combined with the lifestyles of the victims, would make them difficult cases to solve.

  Then came a break, and it landed in Parrish’s backyard.

  News reports about Areba Smith had caught the attention of a potential witness, a man named Wayne Olds, who contacted the police. He said that he had known Areba from the Tampa bar scene. He had seen her the night before her body had been dumped in the graveyard. He claimed that a dark truck had approached her on Columbus Avenue, in a rundown area known as the “hole” or “dope hole.”

  Olds described the truck as either dark brown or black. It was a “wrecker-type” without a boom in the back. It had rotating lights on the roof; one light was broken, and the amber yellow metal cap that fitted on top of the light was missing. The truck had tinted windows, and the wheels wore huge 4x4 tires. Areba had talked to the driver. Olds said that he had seen the vehicle in the neighborhood before, but he didn’t know to whom it belonged.

  For investigators, the reference to a dark truck rang bells, so they searched their files once again. Eight months earlier, a prostitute had claimed that a john driving a dark truck had tried to kill her. The woman had been afraid to press charges, but she agreed to speak with police about the incident. She told the cops that a large man, whom she knew as “Big Mike,” tried to pick her up one evening.

  They started talking about a price for sex—was it going to be “around-the world” for a hundred bucks—maybe down to $50 if work was slow, or a ho’s strip with a blow job for $20 and a handful of green stamps? Then, as the negotiations continued, he suddenly grabbed her around the throat and started to choke her. She reached for the doorknob, jumped out, and started screaming for help. The police had been called, but by then her attacker had fled.

  The hooker gave police a description of Big Mike: “big black motherfucker, around 266 pounds, brown eyes, six feet tall, balding, strange oblong-shaped head topped dome-like. He had a bullish neck set on equally powerful shoulders. His hands were the size of dinner plates.”

  “This was one guy you would not invite home to meet your daughter,” the investigators thought among themselves.

  The investigators again checked their files. Big Mike was a real piece of work. His real name was Michael Tyrone Crump, and he had a rap sheet as long as a giraffe’s neck, which included a five-year prison term for aggravated battery intended harm, and aggravated assault with a weapon—no intent to kill.

  Police went to Crump’s home and hammered on the door. The suspect was not around, but a dark truck matching the witnesses’s description was parked in the driveway. Parrish photographed the vehicle, then phoned Wayne Olds, asking him to return to the police station, where he was shown a photo-pack of six different trucks, including the suspect’s vehicle, which Olds immediately picked out.

  Tampa police now believed that Crump had committed at least two serious crimes, but they did not have sufficient evidence to arrest him. However, based on their two witnesses, they did have probable cause to believe that the crimes had been committed in his truck, and once they had obtained a warrant, they would have authority to seize the vehicle and determine whether it had been used in any illegal activity and contained evidence of those crimes.

  Detective Parrish decided to seize Crump’s vehicle on a public roadway:We stopped the truck on a city street, and we informed the driver, who turned out to be Michael Tyrone Crump, that we needed his vehicle for evidentiary purposes on the belief that it had been used in a recent crime.

  Crump remained calm, even when he was asked if he knew Areba Smith. He said he did not. The police told him that he was not under arrest, and that he was free to go.

  The truck was taken to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s impound lot, where it was examined by trace evidence specialist Timothy Whitfield, who said, “As a part of searching a vehicle, we are charged with finding any, or all evidence that might be visible or invisible to the naked eye, and I first processed the truck for visible evidence.”

  Whitfield found a woman’s earring on the floor of the cab. He also found a wooden device with a noose attached. It was a form of garote, and Whitfield had no doubt as to its purpose. “This was most unusual,” he later explained in court, “because not everybody had one of these in their vehicle. And you have to ask, what are you using this for if you are not using it as a restraining device?”

  Hidden between the passenger side rubber floor mat and the tire wall, investigators discovered another clue: a driver’s license belonging to Lavinia Palmore Clark. She was one of the young women killed prior to Areba Smith. Because Clark was a known prostitute, and Crump was a known john, the item itself could be explained away. But to Whitfield, the location of the license was incriminating. In his evidence he stated: “Either it [the license] was intentionally placed there by the suspect to hide it, or, perhaps the victim had placed it there in in the hope that in the days to come someone would find part ofof her in that truck.”

  Then the forensic team started searching for evidence invisible to the human eye. They used a chemical called Luminol to test for the presence of human blood. A blue glow revealed a fine spray. The pattern was familiar in that it matched the blood spatter from Areba’s nose. Unfortunately, the droplets were tiny, no larger than pinpoints. There was no way to prove that they had come from the victim, as Timothy Whitfield explained:There was nothing I was able to do due to the microscopic nature of the blood. This was, of course, prior to the days of DNA, and you needed quite a bit more blood to do complete workups.

  Investigators vacuumed the interior of Crump’s truck, searching for any hairs or fibers that might link the suspect to his victims. One intriguing find was a long machete hidden behind the front seat.

  In the laboratory, examiners det
ermined that the rope of the garote, was the same diameter as the rope marks on the wrists of the victims. However, one of the most important pieces of evidence was a long strand of hair that could not have come from the suspect. Analysis of the root showed that it just hadn’t fallen out—it had been ripped out of the scalp. This hair sample was compared with hair taken from Areba Smith, but the color and texture did not match. However, when it was compared with Clark’s hair, there was a positive match, for both samples were colored with a chemically identical hair dye. The forensic technicians were confident that both samples had come from the same person.

  While the evidence from inside the truck was solid, all it proved was that Lavinia Palmore Clark had been inside the vehicle. Now, detectives needed to tie Crump’s truck to the murders. They sent the tire casts, made at the Old Centro Asturiano Cemetery crime scene, along with the vehicle’s tires, to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where examiner Oral Woods studied the treads to see if the truck matched the impressions found near Areba’s body. Woods was surprised to see that Crump’s truck had three different types of tires; the two front tires had similar treads, the rear tires had two different tread designs. Two of Crump’s tires matched the impressions in the casts.

  Oral Woods said, “I told Detective Parrish that we were definitely in the ballpark, and that we could definitely do something with them because there were class characteristics present in the casts, as well as some matching individual characteristics in the treads.”