Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  In 2016, investigators in the CSPD cold case unit, which I created, even hired a private company that uses state-of-the-art technology to predict the physical appearance and ancestry of suspects based on DNA phenotyping. Once they had a composite sketch, the army offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead them to Krashoc’s killer.

  We all hoped that move would at least bring some leads, but again, nothing of value turned up. Then the cold case guys took another look at what they might do with the DNA evidence taken from the crime scene more than thirty years earlier.

  They had learned about a new investigative tool after hearing that police in California had finally made an arrest in the infamous “Golden State killer” case in 2018. This involved a serial killer believed to have murdered at least a dozen people and raped at least forty-five women in California from 1976 to 1986.

  The California investigators had gathered DNA evidence, but they never found a match in the standard law enforcement databases. The break in their case came when a detective decided to compare that DNA with a more recently created database. This one contained DNA voluntarily submitted by the millions of people eager to learn more about their heritage and track their relatives and ancestors through services like Ancestry.com and FamilyTreeDNA.

  The California detectives found a lead at GEDmatch, a free service that had been used by a relative of the man they eventually arrested, Joseph James DeAngelo, a seventy-two-year-old former police officer who had lived in the area where victims were found.

  When the relative’s DNA matched that of the suspected serial killer, it put the detectives on his trail because it had to be someone in that immediate family. They then tracked down DeAngelo and charged him.

  Even while that case was awaiting trial, law enforcement agencies from all over the country began following the same procedure, submitting DNA from their cold cases to the genetic-testing databases. The investigators in the Krashoc case tried it. They found matches that led them to Michael Whyte, a nineteen-year army veteran who had been stationed at Fort Carson and lived just three blocks from where Darlene’s body was found.

  He had married, gone on to have a long career as a network engineer, and had no criminal record. Our guys worked with the army investigators to gather information and put Whyte under surveillance. The plan was to somehow secure some of his DNA and compare it directly to that gathered in the Krashoc case.

  They followed him one day to a Starbucks, where he ordered a cup of coffee, sat down and drank it, and then discarded the paper cup in the trash. As soon as he walked out the door, our guys ran in and grabbed the cardboard cup and took his DNA sample from it. The lab results came back as a match, so they obtained a warrant and arrested him on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault.

  This trial is still pending as of this publication.

  Since the Micki Filmore murder occurred in an apartment complex that was not on military property, my division handled the investigation, but we always knew we could count on the military investigators to help us with any information or backup we needed from them.

  wading through the likely suspects

  In our talks with Filmore’s neighbors, we learned that Micki had recently split with a fiancé and was having financial problems. One neighbor, Jesse Capparelli, whose unit was next to the victim’s, knew her well and offered a story that immediately snared our attention.

  He told us he’d been to a nightclub with her on the night of her death, though they were not dating or involved. Capparelli said that during their visit to the club, another man approached Filmore. She appeared to know him. They talked like friends. The neighbor saw her give that man a piece of paper.

  The neighbor said he and Micki returned to their complex at about two a.m., talked briefly, and then went to their respective apartments. But then, about 3:45 a.m., he heard someone knocking on Micki’s door. Capparelli looked out and saw the man whom Filmore had talked to in the club. So he went back to bed, figuring Micki had invited him over.

  Another neighbor, Frances Stanford, told our guys that she’d heard a loud scream and a thumping sound come from Filmore’s apartment around the same time. She assumed there was a fight underway, and went back to bed. It would be a long time before anyone in that apartment complex ever again ignored strange noises in the night.

  The autopsy on Micki Filmore cleared up a few things. She wasn’t intoxicated at the time of her death. Nor was she pregnant, although we’d heard a report to the contrary. We had also been told that she’d recently broken up with her fiancé. We contacted him and learned that he was actually finalizing a divorce so he could marry Micki. He also had an alibi for the time of her murder.

  The fiancé told us he had asked a Colorado Springs friend, Doug Barth, to look after Micki while he was gone. When he learned of her death, he expressed concerns that maybe his friend was involved in it.

  This made me wonder at the quality of his friendships, but we went a-hunting for Mr. Barth and found him. He had an alibi for the night of the murder, so we put him on the back burner. We’d found a more likely suspect by that time, anyway.

  Our detectives had turned up the name of Karl Cloves as the man who had talked with Micki in the nightclub, received a piece of paper from her, and then went knocking on her door in the middle of the night.

  We tracked him down, and Cloves admitted that he had run into Micki at the club, danced with her, and asked for her phone number after she assured him that the neighbor with her was not a suitor.

  Being part man and part hound dog, Cloves assumed that meant she was okay with him coming to her apartment at 3:45 a.m. He claimed that he knocked, but she didn’t answer. Using his keen powers of deduction, he figured she may have fallen asleep, so he left.

  “I did see that her neighbor friend was checking out his window to see who was at Micki’s door,” he added. “But I didn’t stick around to talk to him, or anything.”

  Naturally, we didn’t take his word for that. When he had trouble accounting for his whereabouts the rest of the night, we decided to keep him under lock and key. Cloves’s behavior didn’t help him. Aside from being arrogant, he seemed not to care that this young woman had been murdered.

  We asked for some samples of body fluid and he complied. It always takes a few weeks to get the results, and if he was the killer, I wanted him off the street.

  upping the ante

  Three weeks into this investigation we had identified a couple of solid suspects, but we hadn’t been able to nail anyone down for certain, which was beyond frustrating. We still were very interested in Karl Cloves and preparing to dig deeper into his background, when my worst fear came true.

  On August 12, there was another murder in the Pikes Peak Apartments complex. And it was another young woman. Right under our noses.

  You can imagine my rage.

  No, you probably can’t.

  This case was already personal for me because of the first young female victim and what was done to her. Now it was threatening my reputation and my career. I had no doubt it was the same killer, and he had thrown down the gauntlet.

  The second victim was Barbara Kramer, twenty-four, a nurse at Eisenhower Hospital. My wife was a nurse at a different hospital, so that poured even more salt into the wound.

  When Barbara Kramer didn’t show up for work, the hospital tried to reach her and couldn’t, so they contacted her sister. She found yesterday’s newspaper sitting outside the door of the apartment. This was not a good sign.

  Barbara Kramer’s sister and other family members had talked to her about the previous murder in her apartment complex. They had offered to let her stay with them, but she assured everyone that she would be extra careful.

  If that was the case, her killer must have been particularly cunning.

  They found her body in her apartment bedroom. A few pieces o
f furniture were moved or overturned. There were few other signs of a struggle.

  Her family was devastated, and very angry with the Colorado Springs Police Department and its homicide unit. I couldn’t blame them. I was equally pissed off—maybe more so, because after seeing the crime scene, I knew that it had to be the same guy.

  He’d picked a similar target: a young woman living alone. He left Barbara Kramer in much the same position as he’d left Micki Filmore. Both victims were attacked between four a.m. and seven a.m., raped, and strangled.

  With the first case, we had considered that Filmore’s death might have resulted from accidental strangulation as the result of rough or “edge” sex, in which one partner chokes the other. When this crime occurred, in the late 1980s, this sort of thing was mostly limited to couples who were into sexual bondage and dominance role-playing.

  We didn’t see a lot of deaths related to it back then, but with the spread of internet porn over the past several decades, there have been a lot more cases of sex-related deaths through accidental strangulation.

  I advise anyone who has teenagers, male or female, to discuss the dangers of this sort of sex. One study found that nearly a quarter of adult women in the United States have felt scared during sex, and one of the reasons is because partners tried to choke them, thinking it was an okay thing to do. It’s not. Even if both people have talked about it and agreed to this form of sex, there is a very real danger that you can be seriously injured or killed.

  We considered that this might have happened to Micki Filmore, but when the second victim was also strangled after being raped, it pretty much eliminated that theory. These killings appeared to be intentional and planned out.

  We were looking at a potential serial killer targeting young women in our city, and that was a chilling thought for everyone. Nothing gets the media more churned up, and city officials more outraged, than a serial killer on the loose.

  As head of our homicide unit, I was up against the wall. Especially since this second attack obviously eliminated one of our top suspects, Cloves, the guy who had met Filmore at the bar and then gone to her apartment. We had to let him go, which meant our killer was still out there, unafraid and on the prowl.

  After studying this second crime scene, I went outside and stood on the second-floor balcony of the apartment building, looking into the central courtyard. I was so despondent and mortified that I actually considered throwing myself off.

  The only thing that stopped me was that two stories wasn’t all that high, and I didn’t want to end up both paralyzed and pissed off.

  The pressure was intense. The press targeted me, which came with the job, so I was the subject of the dreaded “police baffled” headlines. My bosses felt free to blame me for the killer remaining on the loose. My own guys hated me because I was working them like dogs.

  So I was universally despised outside my immediate family, and Kathy wasn’t all that happy with me either, because I was either gone all the time or home being a sullen SOB.

  I was obsessed with finding this killer, who definitely had a modus operandi. This was not a simple home invasion or crime of opportunity. There did not appear to be any search for money, drugs, or guns.

  There was no ransacking, no sign of extended fighting, very little out of place in either apartment. The disturbed areas were very limited. Once he was in the door, he appeared to overwhelm his victims quickly and then rape them.

  He got in and out fast, and there appeared to be no forcible entry. This indicated that his victims knew him or might at least recognize him. That led me to believe that he lived in the same apartment complex. He gained entrance because his victims knew him, and he didn’t stick around, for fear of being recognized by other residents.

  This was a large apartment complex with people working different shifts, coming and going and hanging out twenty-four hours a day. Many of the doorways were easily visible to other tenants. I figured that was why he wanted to get in and out fast.

  And if he lived there, it was easy for him to stalk his neighbors and make them his victims. This was all just conjecture on my part, but it made sense based on the evidence.

  He was looking like a serial killer. They were usually cunning, but their bloodlust often led them to take greater and greater risks, which eventually led to mistakes. Sooner or later, someone would spot him and remember.

  Then it would be our turn to pounce.

  The sooner, the better.

  neighborhood watch

  Panicking and blaming don’t solve homicide cases. Good old-fashioned police work often does, and in this case, our nonstop interviews with residents of the Pikes Peak Apartment complex eventually paid off with a major break in the case.

  One resident reported hearing screams from Barbara Kramer’s apartment sometime after six a.m. That was only of marginal help, but it allowed us to nail down the time frame.

  And then another resident helped us home in on a suspect. This neighbor looked out a window around the same time and saw none other than Tracy Spencer banging on Kramer’s door, while holding a piece of paper in his hand, around 6:25 a.m.

  Spencer had claimed he discovered Micki Filmore’s body while walking by her apartment window. And now we had a witness who saw him knocking on the second victim’s door around the time she’d been murdered?

  Well, isn’t that interesting!

  We had already looked into Spencer’s criminal history. He had some minor offenses, though nothing to suggest that he might be a serial rapist and killer. Even so, his presence was confirmed at both crime scenes around the time the rapes and murders occurred, and that was enough to secure an arrest warrant.

  The bosses were pressuring me to go for it, but I wanted to make one more run at his wife, Lisa. I wanted to see if she was still standing by the story that she’d been the first to go inside Micki Filmore’s apartment after her husband spotted her body through a window.

  She had been fairly convincing when we first talked to her, but I wondered how she would respond if we turned up the heat a little. Why would any woman protect a man who was raping and killing other women? Maybe she feared him. That would certainly be understandable. But what if we promised to put him away for the rest of his life? Would she still protect the asshole then?

  spousal abuse

  Two of our ace interrogators—excuse me, interviewers—sat down with Lisa Spencer and gently but firmly put her through the meat grinder. No, I jest. They went at her lightly, knowing that she might well be terrified of her husband.

  They promised to protect her and told her that we needed to stop this killer, whoever he was, before he claimed more victims.

  “Lisa, was Tracy really with you every moment on the night of Micki Filmore’s killing, before the discovery of her body? Or had he gone out earlier?”

  She tried to stick with the lie, briefly, but when they told her a witness had seen her husband outside Barbara Kramer’s apartment on the night of her murder—making him the only person to be seen at both apartments on the nights of the murders—Lisa’s carefully constructed story began to fall apart.

  “He went out for a walk earlier. He always goes out for walks at night, leaving me for hours,” she said. “He never tells me where he goes.”

  “Do you think he’s meeting other women?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t be all that surprised. He’s aggressive that way. He likes it rough.”

  We found that interesting, too.

  Then Lisa Spencer gave us another nail for her husband’s coffin.

  On the night of Barbara Kramer’s death, her husband told her that he’d found some of Kramer’s mail on the ground near the apartment complex mailboxes and wanted to return it to her.

  “I’d already found an empty stamped envelope with her name on it, but I didn’t tell him that. I just threw it away,” she said. “H
e was really mad when he couldn’t find it.”

  That explained why these women opened the door for him—he was pretending to have pieces of their mail that he’d found.

  Our detectives then asked Lisa if she had really gone to Micki Filmore’s apartment after her husband claimed he’d seen her lying on the floor.

  “No, he made me do that to help him create a cover story,” she said.

  “Why would you do that?” our guy asked. “Why would you help him cover up something so terrible as that?”

  “I loved him,” she said.

  I knew love was blind, but I didn’t think it was that stupid.

  one good lie deserves another

  As our detectives were loading up on damning testimony against Tracy Spencer, we learned that he might be planning to flee the area, so we got our warrant and snatched him up without a fight.

  We searched the house and found the envelope with Barbara Kramer’s name on it in the trash, where Lisa Spencer had said she put it.

  I questioned Tracy Spencer after telling him we were charging him with both murders. He stuck to his story for the most part, though he did admit to taking a piece of Barbara Kramer’s mail to her that night.

  “But I never went inside,” he said.

  It was obvious that this guy was a pathological liar, so I decided to try out one of my own.

  “You know, we took samples from Micki Filmore’s body, and you were a match,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because we’d been having an affair, but I didn’t kill her,” he said. “She was into me.”

  This guy had a bullshit answer for everything, but we had him by the gonads at that point. When the lab results did come back, his blood and hair samples matched those found at both crime scenes.

  We had also turned up other damning evidence once we had Spencer locked up. While searching his apartment, we found a necklace that had belonged to one of his victims. Some serial killers have been known to keep mementos from their victims, though I wouldn’t say it’s all that common. It is, however, very common for child molesters to stockpile them. We always look for them and nearly always find them hidden away somewhere in their homes or cars or storage lockers.