Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Someone else associated with Stuart Knowlton was also undergoing rehabilitation and recuperation down in Florida near Orlando. Her name was Dorothy Noga, and at the time of Cassie’s death she was working as a masseuse in St. Paul. She didn’t much like the work, but it paid an average of $2,000 a week, enough to let her husband stay home and raise their four children. According to the story investigators had pieced together, Knowlton first came into Lee Lenore’s sauna where Noga worked on November 11, 1981, the day after the abduction and the day Cassie’s body was found. Curiously, he asked her to be an alibi witness for him in case anyone accused him of anything around this time. Noga didn’t know what to make of this, but took his business card, on which he wrote his address and phone number.

  Noga had been appalled by news of the little girl’s death, though she didn’t connect Knowlton with it. She did, however, think of another of her clients who had professed fantasies of sex with children. In the intimacy of the massage room, men tended to confide in Dorothy. So she phoned in an anonymous tip to the police.

  Several days later, the crime was still preying on her mind and Dorothy Noga decided she had to get more personally involved if she thought she had information that could help. This time when she called, she left her name and agreed to be interviewed by detectives. During the interview, a photograph of Knowlton happened to slip out of the detectives’ folder onto the floor. Noga recognized him as the man who had come in for a massage the day after the murder. Was he a suspect, she wanted to know. The detectives confirmed that he was, but that he was refusing to talk to them.

  Maybe he’d talk to her, she figured, and offered to call him. The police turned her down on this offer, not wanting to be accused of obtaining information illegally after Knowlton had contacted a lawyer and the lawyer had told him not to talk.

  But once the police left, Noga decided that they had no power to tell her what to do, so she called the number on his card. Noga was confident she could get this man to talk to her. The thirty-two-year-old masseuse was a good listener and she could almost always get men to talk to her.

  And that’s exactly what she did. Before long, she was having almost daily phone conversations with Knowlton, some lasting several hours. He seemed to her lonely and in despair, and inordinately preoccupied with the killing of the little Hansen girl. Noga felt sure she was on the right track.

  At the same time, the exercise was draining and depressing. Knowlton often talked as if they were having a romantic relationship and Noga felt queasy leading him on this way. “I would get so depressed talking to him, I wanted to give up. I would just sit and cry,” she later told the St. Paul Dispatch.

  But she had four children of her own and her heart went out to Cassie and her grieving family. If she could, she wanted to spare others the same horror. Then in one conversation, she said, he admitted killing Cassie. That inspired her to continue, and also made her start taping the conversations. She informed the St. Paul police, and gave them the tapes. Seeing the resource they had, the police encouraged her to keep going. But once the taping began, Knowlton never again mentioned any personal role in Cassie’s death, though he still continued to talk about the case.

  On December 13, a little over a month after the murder, the conversations stopped for good. It was her husband’s thirty-fourth birthday and Noga was working at the Comfort Center Sauna. The only thing she initially remembered from that day was waking up in a hospital room at the St. PaulRamsey Medical Center—the same faculty to which Stuart Knowlton would be brought after being struck by the car—and seeing her agonized mother at the foot of her bed. She had been stabbed repeatedly and her throat slashed. Her attacker had left her on the floor, bleeding and near death. Doctors called her survival “miraculous.” She was put under twenty-four-hour guard at the hospital and gave police a vague description of her assailant. They brought her photographic spreads of possible suspects. One man was brought in, but was released for lack of evidence.

  The police immediately suspected Knowlton and when they told me what had happened, I agreed. He would have confided in Dorothy to try to relieve his own stress, but as his stress mounted, he would have realized how vulnerable he’d made himself. The only way out would have been to eliminate the threat.

  There were no witnesses to the crime, no useful forensic evidence, and Noga could remember nothing more than what she had said. After she got out of the hospital, she and her family moved to Florida to continue her recuperation and try to remove herself from the reach of her attacker, who probably regretted not finishing the job.

  But another series of conversations between Stuart Knowlton and a woman he had met only recently were to prove equally critical. Janice Rettman, the same age as Dorothy Noga, was the director of the St. Paul Housing Information Office. It was a high-ranking job with a tremendous amount of responsibility, and the short, vibrant strawberry blond was known in city government circles as an administrator who could get things done.

  Rettman met Knowlton on March 16, 1981, eight months before Cassie Hansen’s abduction and murder. He came to her agency saying that he was about to be evicted from the Roosevelt Homes public housing project. His wife was leaving him, taking their two children with her, and the welfare payments and food stamps they had been using to make ends meet had been cut off. He’d just begun driving a cab and had been to several churches and social service agencies, he said, but no one seemed able to help. The reason for the eviction, as Rettman discovered, was two complaints filed against Knowlton. The first had been early the previous fall when Knowlton invited two fourteen-year-old girls into his apartment to play cards. Once he had them there, Knowlton reportedly described to them how babies were born and began talking about sex, birth control, and menstruation. He promised to show them his penis. When the girls’ parents reported the incident to the police and they, in turn, informed the public housing office, Knowlton was warned that if there were any more such incidents, he and his family would be evicted.

  Then in February, Knowlton asked a nine-year-old girl to take her pants off for him. The girl was so frightened and traumatized that she developed recurring nightmares.

  At the time, Knowlton was living temporarily in an efficiency apartment a couple of blocks from the women’s shelter where his wife and children were staying.

  In speaking to Rettman, Knowlton had no hesitancy talking about his sexual involvement with children. Though she’d never done anything like it before, Rettman instinctively decided not to give ham her real name, introducing herself as Janice Reever. She said she was obligated to report any suspected instances of child abuse to the proper authorities and told him, “I think you need help.”

  The child protection authorities told her there had been other reports about Knowlton but that they’d never been able to get sufficient proof for prosecution.

  When Rettman heard on the news that Cassandra Hansen’s body had been found, she immediately thought of the man she had dealt with in March. He said he’d been going to various churches and the efficiency he’d been renting was only ten blocks from Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church. A few days later she called Stuart Knowlton to follow up on his housing situation. She found him distraught and unwilling to talk. A couple of days after that, though, he called her back. With the same candor he had demonstrated at their first encounter, he told her the police had just searched his apartment when she’d called and he was so upset he couldn’t talk. He told her he was going through hell, was very lonely, and needed someone to talk to and to visit him.

  Knowing that the police were trying to put together information on Knowlton, but that they were having difficulty doing it, Rettman, like Noga, decided to get involved.

  “No child should be hurt,” she later told Linda Kohl of the St. Paul Dispatch. “Every adult is responsible for the children’s welfare. If I could assist the police in bringing that person to justice, or assist in making sure that person never touches a child again—then it was right, it was important. We
are responsible for our children, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s.”

  I firmly believe that if Janice Rettman’s attitude was more widely held and acted upon, we’d all be living in a lot safer, more humane society.

  Being a fellow municipal official, Rettman went directly to Police Chief William McCutcheon and offered to help. As he had with Dorothy Noga, Knowlton began pouring out his soul on the telephone to Janice Rettman. He talked about the child molestation charges that had led to his eviction, he talked about his marital problems and inability to hold a steady job, and he told about his religious conversion the previous year while listening to Johnny Cash. Rettman took notes during each conversation, then typed them up and delivered them to the police. Much of the information the police had on Knowlton, much of the way they knew he conformed so closely to my profile, came from Rettman’s compiled dossier.

  The near-fatal attack on Dorothy Noga upped the ante considerably. Though fearful, Rettman kept at it, now making copies of her notes for safekeeping if anything similar happened to her.

  What made Rettman take the physical and emotional risks to become involved? What made her so different, say, from the thirty-eight neighbors who listened without lifting a finger as Winston Mosely stabbed Kitty Genovese to death outside her apartment house in fashionable Kew Gardens, Queens, on the morning of March 13,1964? We could come up with some glib, superficial answers: She had a degree in social work. She had spent six and a half years as a VISTA volunteer. She was naturally adventuresome, having left her Texas home at eighteen in quest of an education. But none of this really speaks to the core values that made her part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The fact is that she got involved because she felt it was the right thing to do, just as Dorothy Noga had.

  I have spent my career studying the complex motivations of criminals, but basically, all the prior influences on an individual resolve down to one key element: the choice to commit the crime. Likewise, doing the right thing resolves down to a simple factor: the choice to get involved. We’re all responsible for our actions.

  Knowlton never admitted the Hansen murder to her, but he seemed obsessed with it in their conversations in ways that chilled Janice Rettman to her core. He said he had had a “vision” about the case and had a “sixth sense” that the murder of Cassie Hansen and the attack on Dorothy Noga were related. He discussed all sorts of details, including the method of disposal of the body.

  And in one of these conversations, he made his crucial slipup.

  He mentioned that Cassie Hansen had been beaten before she died, the fact police had kept confidential as a control.

  It was shortly after this revelation that Knowlton suffered his automobile accident, losing the lower part of his leg. Rettman visited him in the hospital, and later at the Ramsey County Nursing Home. For some of these visits, she brought a tape recorder, hidden in her handbag. For later ones, she was wired with a police body mike. Going impressively proactive, she wore a pair of black patent leather shoes on several occasions because they were similar to the ones Cassie was wearing when she was taken. I wish I’d thought of this, but it was purely Rettman’s idea.

  When the police told me about her activities, I told them that this was absolutely the right way to proceed with such an elusive and “uncooperative” suspect, and suggested some other types of approaches that might be fruitful. For example, Rettman might give him a nice journal in which he could record his thoughts and feelings.

  Though he claimed to have nothing to do with the murder and murder attempt, he told Rettman he might have a “perfect double” somewhere in the city. This was a key piece of information, signifying another mechanism for trying to cope with the crime. This would be in my mind three years later as I sat in the office of Sheriff Jim Metts in Lexington County, South Carolina, interrogating a dark-haired, pudgy, bearded electrician’s assistant named Larry Gene Bell. A solid combination of good profiling, good proactive technique, first-rate police work and forensic analysis, and wonderful and courageous families had led to the arrest of Bell for the heartbreaking murders of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith and nine-year-old Debra Helmick. I knew the chances of a confession were slim to none. South Carolina was a capital punishment state and there aren’t many sales tools available to convince a subject to buy a one-way ticket to the chair. The only real possibility is to offer him some face-saving justification or explanation for the crime.

  So I spoke to him about how everyone has a good side and a bad side. The only thing the judge and jury in court were going to know about him was that he was a cold-blooded killer. I was giving him the opportunity to tell me about the other side.

  “Larry, as you’re sitting here now,” I said, “did you do this thing?”

  With tears glistening in his eyes, he replied, “All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this, but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”

  I knew that was as close as we’d ever get to a confession. But the state’s case, directed by County Solicitor Don Meyers, was convincing. After a nearly month-long trial, the jury took less than an hour to find Bell guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death by electrocution. More than eleven years after the killing, Bell was finally executed early on the morning of Friday, October 4, 1996.

  In May 1982, after the police had keyed on Stuart Knowlton as their primary suspect and instituted the types of proactive techniques we’d discussed, Dorothy Noga showed up at St. Paul police headquarters and told detectives she was beginning to get back some memory of the day of her attack. She said that Knowlton came to the sauna where she was working and angrily accused her of betraying him. He told her he had stopped in Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church to use the men’s room and saw the little blond girl going by herself to the ladies’ room.

  He waited for her to come out, Noga reported from his account, asked her to play a game with him in the hallway, then took Cassie out to where his taxicab was parked. He made advances to her, made the child touch his penis, then rubbed it between her thighs. This gave him feelings of euphoria, Noga said, but the little girl kept crying so he put his hand over her mouth and the next thing he knew she wasn’t breathing. At least, that’s the way he reportedly told her it had happened.

  After this confession, according to Noga, he brought out a knife, chased her around the room, then began slashing at her throat. Then she lost consciousness.

  On May 26, St. Paul police believed they finally had sufficient cause for a search warrant, which they applied for and received. Up until then, they had kept the details of the investigation of this highly publicized case as quiet and out of the media as they could.

  Knowlton’s account did square with the finding of semen on the thighs of Cassie’s tights and Al Robillard of the FBI Laboratory confirmed that the pubic hair found on her body and head hair found on her turtleneck sweater were consistent with Knowlton’s. Under microscopic examination, both reflected an unusual disease condition known as “ringed” or “banded” hair which makes Various parts of the individual hair strand appear light or dark. His blood type also corresponded with that of the semen stains on Cassie’s clothing.

  Stuart Knowlton was charged with the kidnapping and first-degree murder of Cassandra Hansen. He was placed in a state mental facility, examined and found competent to stand trial. At his own request, his case was heard by a judge rather than a jury. Ramsey District Judge James M. Lynch presided at the trial. Thomas Poch led the prosecution. Philip Vilaume and Jack Nordby defended Knowlton, and offered to plea-bargain to second-degree murder, but without an admission of guilt.

  “That was totally unacceptable,” Poch recalled.

  Dana McCarthy, a mother who took her son to the same family night service from which Cassie disappeared, testified that she saw a man going up a flight of stairs just after the little girl had. In court, she identified that man as Stuart Knowlton.

  When it was Janice Rettman’s turn
to testify and she was asked, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” she gave the bailiff a thumbs-up signal and responded, “You bet.” Her notes and the level of her organization were very impressive.

  The opposite was true for Knowlton. He said he was driving his taxi during the time Cassie had been abducted. As a cab driver, he was supposed to have trip logs which at least could have given some weight to his alibi claim. But he said his logs were in a briefcase that he believed had been stolen by a customer and he couldn’t remember where he’d been that night.

  Donald Whalen, Jr., Knowlton’s taxi dispatcher, testified that he tried to radio the driver several times that evening but couldn’t raise him. Patricia Jones, general manager of a competing cab company, stated that Knowlton tried to buy blank trip sheets from her on the day Cassie’s body was found, even though Whalen told the court there were plenty available for the asking at his own company.

  It also came out in court that Knowlton had spent time in a mental hospital in Traverse City, Michigan, after molesting a seven-year-old girl.

  The trial lasted thirteen days and involved forty-eight witnesses and more than a hundred exhibits. Knowlton did not choose to testify. At the trial’s conclusion, Judge Lynch found Knowlton guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree criminal sexual conduct and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Under Minnesota law, that made him eligible for parole in 2001.

  Knowlton listened impassively, then in a ten-minute rambling statement, asserted his innocence. “As God is my witness, I swear to you this day, I did not abduct Cassandra Lynn Hansen from the church she was attending,” he told the judge. Interesting to note, he did not deny killing her, all of which could have amounted to a complex psychological defense mechanism on his part.

  Without admitting anything he also reasserted the religiosity that I thought would be a part of his personality when he said, “I had no reason to take anyone’s life for God had not given me that right. I have had no reason to have any vengeance against Cassandra Lynn Hansen or Dorothy Noga.”