Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  During our search of Spencer’s home, we also found a bizarre series of notes that he appeared to have written to himself. In one of them, he wrote something along the lines of, “I’m sorry I do bad things.” It wasn’t exactly a confession note—more a general statement of regret.

  It’s hard to say what went on in this guy’s head. He was a strange one. He didn’t fit any mold even though the two murders we nailed him for were very similar. While looking into his past, we discovered that he had also killed an elderly woman when he was a juvenile, in an attempted robbery.

  The victim was in her eighties, and she died after Spencer knocked her down in the robbery. This had occurred in Mississippi and was in juvenile records there, which is why we didn’t find it earlier in our investigation. He was found guilty and served prison time, but apparently, he wasn’t in for long.

  We couldn’t use the juvenile record against him, but even so, we had enough evidence that Spencer pleaded guilty on December 31, 1986, to one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder for the deaths of two women, in exchange for withdrawal of the death penalty.

  The court sentenced him to life imprisonment on the first-degree murder count and twenty-four years in prison on the second-degree murder count, with the sentences to be served consecutively. The goal was to make sure he stayed behind bars for the rest of his life, and as far as I know, he is still locked up.

  rare beast

  Our killer in this case was a rare beast: an instinctive bad guy—one of the few I ran across in my many years of locking up shitheads, male and female. He killed at least twice, and the second time was right under our noses. Both victims were raped, although the earlier case in his juvenile records was a robbery gone wrong.

  Sex was a trigger in our two cases, and it’s a wild card in any murder investigation. A psychiatrist once told me that he’d be willing to spend hours discussing homicidal triggers with me, unless sex was involved.

  “If these murders are sex-related, all bets are off,” he said. “You cannot predict behaviors that involve sexual urges and desires. After the survival instinct, our sexual instincts are the most powerful driving force in human behavior.”

  If someone’s sex drive is twisted beyond what society considers normal or legal or safe, there is no way to correct the resulting behavior, he said. “It’s too strong a drive.” That’s why most psychiatrists will tell you that child molesters cannot be “cured” or successfully treated.

  My own experience in dealing with sex-related crimes, including homicide, is that there are no limits to the depravity of humans. Tracy Spencer probably didn’t understand what drove him to kill these two women. His wife said he was into rough sex, but he hadn’t killed her. So why did he kill our two victims? We will likely never know. He was a very strange beast.

  We were haunted by the thought that this demon may well have killed others before we found his trail. We did find it unusual that he was married, given his apparent hatred of women. A psychiatrist might have been able to figure out his wife’s loyalty and love for him; it remains beyond my comprehension. During interviews, he was difficult to read. His emotions were all over the place. One minute, he’d be tearfully protesting his innocence, and then a switch would flip, and he would become very cold and disconnected.

  His behavior was often bizarre. He’d surge with energy that had him bouncing his knees, wriggling in his chair, and wringing his hands, and then he’d get nearly comatose. During one interview, Spencer claimed he was affected by “lunar cycles,” as if he were a werewolf or vampire.

  There are many varying opinions on the influence of the moon’s phases on human behavior. Some scientists say it’s more myth than fact. Most cops and ER doctors will tell you that things get very busy for them when there is a full moon.

  But lunar cycles are no excuse for the sort of lunacy perpetrated by Tracy Spencer. I have no doubt that he would have killed more women had we not stopped him. So, yes, I believe he was a serial killer. He was bent on punishing women. It was not about sexual gratification. It was about hurting other humans.

  Needless to say, he was a sick son of a bitch. When he picked up his mail, he’d steal letters addressed to women he targeted, and use that to get them to open their doors.

  He went out at night to choose those victims; then he’d watch and observe them, like a wolf selecting its prey. He took his time and selected the most vulnerable women. He had malice aforethought, as the lawyers say, and that made him particularly dangerous.

  He would overpower them quickly, rape them, and then strangle them. Choking someone to death is an act of pure hatred. Studies have found that it is the method used in about 35 percent of serial murders. Those killers are more likely to choke victims to death than are those who kill only one person. Psychiatrists believe that those who kill repeatedly use strangulation because they feel more powerful and in control than they would using a weapon.

  Rapists don’t often kill their victims unless it’s accidental. They usually want them to suffer for a long time after the actual attack, because rape is driven more by a twisted hatred of women.

  We once had a serial rapist in Colorado Springs who attacked nearly forty women, but he did not kill any of them even though he threatened them with a knife. Then again, there are always exceptions. Humans are complicated, and violent criminals are even more so. The experts will tell you also that it is rare for a rapist to attack women of different races.

  Yet Micki Filmore was Black, and Barbara Kramer was white.

  We didn’t just shut the book on this case after Spencer was locked up. We put a lot of time into looking for similar cases of rape and murder in our region and around the country, but we couldn’t connect Tracy Spencer to any of them.

  I still wonder if there were others out there. He killed at least three times, and the third was right under our noses. That didn’t sit well.

  I have no doubt that Spencer would have killed more women had we not stopped him. He had no fear of law enforcement. In his mind, we did not matter. All that mattered to him was raping and killing.

  Well, we took that away from him. So I guess we do matter after all.

  which reminds me . . .

  Writing about the Tracy Spencer homicides took me back to my nine months as watch commander for the Colorado Springs Police Department’s Sand Creek substation. I had been promoted from detective sergeant to lieutenant. The plan was for me to do a tour of other divisions before taking over as head of Homicide.

  Sand Creek was our busiest substation. From there, we ran patrols in the neighborhood that included Spencer’s apartment building, where his victims also lived, as well as all the subsidized apartment projects in the city—in general, a low-income population.

  The Sand Creek substation was known by everyone in the police department as “Fort Apache” in reference to the 1981 movie Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman as a veteran cop in a crime-ridden precinct of New York City. For my tour, I was the watch commander for the “cocktail shift” there, between two p.m. and ten p.m. Those were wild times.

  When word got out that there was a tough new sheriff in town, the negative reaction wasn’t limited to local outlaws. On my first day, I made an inspection of our small building. I wandered back into the locker room used by the male patrol officers to change into and out of their uniforms.

  Two young cops were in there. They couldn’t see me as I approached on the other side of the lockers, but I could hear them talking.

  “Who’s the new commander?” asked one.

  “Lieutenant Kenda,” said the other.

  “You mean the murder guy? I heard he’s a fucking monster!”

  “Jesus, I’ve heard the same thing about him.”

  I was enjoying their banter but decided to stick my head around the corner and interrupt.

  “Boys, the monster will
see you in lineup in five minutes.”

  Those two patrol officers worked hard to avoid me for the next six months.

  I have to admit, that was a fun tour of duty for me because it was the Wild West and I was the sheriff. In just one week, we had more than a hundred reports of shots fired along one street in our patrol area. Residents were terrified, and my phone was ringing off the hook.

  Finally, I rounded up twenty police cruisers and the officers to drive them, and we did a convoy with lights flashing and sirens screaming up and down that street. Then, once everyone was out on the porches and lawns, I got on my vehicle’s public address system and put out a message:

  “We are tired of coming down here every five minutes, so if you all don’t stop fighting and shooting, I’m locking down this neighborhood. You won’t be able to jaywalk, spit on the sidewalk, drop a piece of paper, or drive more than a block in your car without being stopped, questioned, and maybe even given a citation or thrown in jail.”

  Basically, I was telling them that the neighborhood better quiet down or we were going to be up their asses 24-7 until it did. The hard-ass tactics worked. I learned that the residents appreciated a strong police presence.

  A sense of humor helped, too.

  One night at Sand Creek, two patrol officers yelled for me to come back into our holding cell. I hustled back there and found them struggling with a big guy they’d arrested. He was fighting with them, bouncing all over the room and getting in some good licks.

  I said, “Why don’t you just settle down before I call in a whole bunch of badass cops who will beat you into submission? You can’t win this battle. We will outnumber you, and the only possible result is that you will get beat up and still be in jail facing even more charges.”

  He glared at me, unimpressed with my reasoning.

  “Fuck off, you white saltine-cracker motherfucker,” he said.

  “Hey, that’s Lieutenant White Saltine-Cracker Motherfucker to you!”

  He stopped fighting because he was laughing so hard, and as he sat down and let them cuff him, he looked at me and said, “Ha! You are all right, man!”

  I felt a connection to the neighborhood even though I didn’t look like most of its residents. I’d come up in a hardscrabble place, too, but this was a much tougher, poorer area—and especially hard on the children.

  One of my most unpleasant duties was to supervise a mass court-ordered “children exchange” every other weekend in the parking lot of our substation. This was where divorced couples who had visitation rights on alternating weekends would bring their kids to switch sides for the weekend.

  A judge had ordered this potentially volatile exchange to be done at the police substation to cut down on the hostilities between ex-spouses that often occurred in these situations.

  Eleven families had been ordered to participate.

  Imagine dozens of little kids crying and dragging their suitcases—usually little more than plastic bags—across the parking lot as their warring parents glared and shouted insults at each other.

  None of my patrol officers wanted to supervise this, because it was such a volatile and heartbreaking event. So I usually just did it myself, and then I went home and hugged my kids, probably for longer than they wanted.

  Along with overseeing that horrendous undertaking and commanding the patrol officers cruising the area, I had to handle any civilians who stumbled in with complaints, tips, or lunatic demands.

  There wasn’t much staff in the office, because our patrol officers were always on the street. My first line of defense was Frannie. She was a police service representative. She was not a cop. She was more of a traffic controller. She decided what to do with walk-ins, whether to chase them out or let them talk to me.

  One night, poor Frannie had about fifteen people lined up waiting to be screened. She was trying to keep them away from me because I had an important visitor, a two-star general who had just taken command of the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Carson.

  Since a lot of his military personnel lived off base in our neighborhood, he had come in to meet me and to do a ride along with our patrol officers. He wanted to get a feel for the area and the living environment. I was glad that he’d shown such an interest.

  At the same time, I had another visitor, who wasn’t all that welcome in my office. She was a large and belligerent juvenile who’d been taken into custody. She was sitting in my office only because we didn’t have any other place to put her due to overcrowding and her female juvenile status.

  She was supposed to sit there and keep her mouth shut while I talked to my more dignified high-ranking guest. Instead, she kept calling me and everyone else “motherfucker.”

  This did not sit well with the general, as you might expect.

  While I was worrying about the possibility of a brawl between the military leader and the juvenile street thug in my office, Frannie came barging in and said, “There is a man out front who says he has a bomb in his shopping bag.”

  It was going to be that kind of night at Fort Apache.

  I flew out the door, telling the female juvenile to stay put but letting the general make his own decision.

  There, in our small waiting area, stood a man with a paper bag that had smoke coming out of it. Not a lot of smoke, but smoke.

  “I think it’s some sort of explosive device,” he said. “It was already smoking when I found it.”

  “Where did it come from?” I asked while ushering him and his bag out into the parking lot.

  “Well, you see, I’m banging this broad who is married, but I didn’t know that. Apparently, her husband found out. He’s an army guy, and I think he tried to blow up my car with this, but I think the fuse went out or it fizzled.

  “Call the bomb squad,” I told Frannie.

  The general had wandered out and heard the explanation. As we walked back into my office, he shook his head and told me, “You know, I served in Desert Storm and I never encountered anything like this place.”

  “Fuck you!” said my other visitor.

  “Yeah, we’re having a real Fort Apache night,” I told the general.

  There were a lot of murders in the Sand Creek substation’s patrol area, and a high percentage of them occurred in the vicinity of a large nightclub called La Jazz Affaire. In one year alone, we had more than a hundred calls to the club and its parking lot.

  From time to time, because of the club’s reputation for violence, the military would ban any of its members from going there. After we had six homicides in or around the jazz club within three weeks, a community meeting was called.

  I wasn’t surprised when residents and business owners in that area invited me to attend. I was surprised, however, that the event was being held inside La Jazz Affaire and hosted by its notorious owner, Charles Collins.

  Collins was a slick and clever fellow. He tended toward flashy suits and Dobermans with spiked collars and rarely ventured out without the company of two large fellows, also in suits, whom he claimed were his lawyers.

  I went to the meeting with my division commander, Captain O, and we were amused to find they were serving wine, cheese, and other foods. We ordered soft drinks, of course.

  “This is going to be interesting,” said my commander.

  This was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, so Captain O and I were the only two white people present. There was also one prominent Korean businesswoman there, wearing a miniskirt, six-inch heels, and a look of contempt.

  Her name sounded like “Son Okay,” and she owned a restaurant and bar next door. We knew the place because neighbors were always complaining about the smell from it.

  Also, she’d had a homicide in her own parking lot recently. Son Okay was not okay with all the crime and its impact on her bottom line.

  Despite some tensions in the room, the midday meeting started out very cordia
l and polite. Most people were drinking wine and booze. Once everyone settled in, Collins, with his Dobermans at his side, stood up, introduced himself, and launched into a very heartfelt speech.

  He reminded me of a preacher, and a very smooth one at that.

  “We are all gathered here in company of our local police department to discuss a terrible wave of criminal activity. We are concerned business leaders, taxpayers, and citizens, and today we’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts on what is causing this problem in our community.”

  Just then Son Okay raised her hand like a kid in class and shouted out in broken English, “The problem is, there are too many damned (racial epithet) in this neighborhood!”

  This particular racially charged word is considered a fighting word, like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater—only worse in this situation.

  The previously cordial crowd instantly turned into a very angry mob. Threats and curses spewed. A large fellow seated next to Son Okay rose from his chair and loomed over her, making threats.

  She whipped off a six-inch heel and smacked him in the nose with the spiked end. He went facedown in his cheese plate, out cold in his Colby and crackers.

  The place went up for grabs. The Dobermans were barking and snarling. Son Okay went into full ninja mode, dropping people left and right with her stilettos until someone whacked her with a chair and knocked her into us.

  Captain O and I were a little slow in taking command of the situation anyway. We couldn’t get up, because we were laughing so hard at the sight of this tiny Asian woman whipping up on everyone around her.

  Finally, we got to our feet, radioed for assistance, and settled everyone down. We arrested eight people at the community meeting called to restore peace and order to the neighborhood.

  Such was life at Fort Apache in the Wild West of Colorado Springs.