by John Douglas
“He was probably arrested as a burglar,” Steve stated. “His other profession.”
“Look,” said Jud, “since you didn’t surface a sexual assailant back in the early 1980s but his activity stopped shortly after the homicide of Carolyn Hamm, go back and look for someone arrested for burglary in the environment where the first rape occurred.”
A burglary conviction ought to be good for about a threeor four-year sentence, Steve reasoned. The timing worked out. “So if you can identify a subject charged with burglary in northern Virginia, incarcerated for about three years, and then is in some kind of work release down in Richmond, that would be a very high-priority suspect.”
Horgas followed the agents’ advice. He went back to the first rape—disconcerting in part because if the killer lived in that neighborhood, he didn’t live very far from where Horgas lived with his wife and young son, whom he left home alone at all hours because of his job—then pulled the files and reviewed all incidents of individuals arrested for burglary within the appropriate time frame.
In Richmond, where the citizens were in full-blown hysterical alert, the detectives weren’t buying his theory—even after he presented them with the same information he showed the FBI agents and even though dark, possibly Negroid hairs were found with several victims.
Immediately after New Year’s 1988, Horgas and Hill started reviewing piles of data printed out from the department’s computer. They targeted offenders arrested in Arlington in 1984 and released three years later in Richmond. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to narrow their search parameters as well as they would have liked: parole records listed offenders from many jurisdictions and they weren’t sorted according to the parolee’s residence. There was also no indication of the offenders’ crimes or when they were incarcerated. So it became a formidable, mostly manual task.
After spending days at this, Horgas refocused. He’d worked the section of Arlington where the first rape occurred and knew a lot of the people there. He tried to remember anyone who would have been the right age to match the description of the rapist. As Paul Mones describes in Stalking Justice, his excellent book on the case, the detective drove the streets to jog his memory and finally came up with a first name: Timmy.
Timmy was a local teenager known as a neighborhood troublemaker in the area around the first rape about ten years earlier. Horgas had investigated him then in connection with a burglary, although he was not arrested for that crime. Back then, Timmy had a reputation for having set fire to something—his mother’s house or maybe her car, Horgas couldn’t recall—which reminded him of how the rapist set fire to the car of one of his victims. Horgas asked around for two days, but no one else in the department remembered this kid. Then, on January 6, 1988, Joe Horgas remembered the teenager’s full name: Timothy Spencer.
A couple of computer checks later, Horgas found what he was looking for: Timothy Spencer—a black male just the right age to be the masked rapist—had a history of burglary arrests dating back to 1980, including a conviction in Alexandria, a neighboring jurisdiction to Arlington, on January 29, 1984. Review of his prison history showed he’d been released to a halfway house in Richmond—Hospitality House—on September 4, 1987.
Details of his last conviction were frightening in the context of the crimes for which Horgas and Hill were considering him: he entered the home through a small back window and was arrested with commemorative coins in his pockets, stolen from several homes, along with a pair of dark socks, a small flashlight, and a screwdriver. A five-inch folding knife was found in his car. Several of the masked rapist’s victims reported that he wore socks over his hands, that he had a flashlight and pulled a folding knife on them. But the commemorative coins were the clincher. The collectible coins belonging to the Tuckers, though potentially valuable to a burglar, were not taken during that break-in. He’d been sent away once for stealing easily identified coins, and he wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake twice. As we’d predicted, he learned from his earlier crime.
According to records, Spencer’s permanent address in Arlington was just 200 yards from where the first rape occurred. The halfway house in Richmond was located within walking distance of both the Hellams and Davis homes.
Horgas contacted the halfway house to compare dates of the 1987 attacks with days and times Spencer signed out. None of the test dates ruled him out. Horgas also learned that if Spencer was their man, another part of our theory was correct: he had a day job at a furniture factory during the week.
Horgas tried calling Richmond, but couldn’t reach the Williams boys, who were out on the scene of another murder. Initially, it looked like the “South Side Strangler’s” work except this victim had been beaten viciously about the head. But later that day, Richmond police responded to a suicide call and found the body of a man who’d dated the murder victim’s sister and rented a room from her until she threw him out. It became apparent that the latest murder was the first copycat of the Strangler.
Tension was high January 7, when Horgas and Hill met with the detectives from Richmond. They agreed to surveillance of Spencer, but were still going with the view that their killer was white. But Spencer had put in for another furlough to Arlington that coming weekend and no one wanted to take any chances. In the end, though, his trip to Arlington was canceled by a snowstorm.
There was a setback that Friday when Richmond authorities stopped Spencer outside Cloverleaf Mall, where he was waiting in a car for two women who were observed shoplifting. Although fearful the heat would cause Spencer to leave the area, Arlington police took the incident as proof that he hung out at the mall, where the task force theorized the killer found his victims.
After more than a week of surveillance, Richmond police decided Spencer was doing nothing suspicious, certainly not acting like a serial killer. They announced they were calling off surveillance Monday the eighteenth. With that, Arlington County Commonwealth Attorney Helen Fahey made the decision to go before a grand jury. They went to court Wednesday the twentieth and got an indictment. The arrest warrant was issued and signed that day.
In anticipation of the arrest, Horgas contacted Quantico for interview tips. Steve advised him to be patient and let Spencer do the talking. In his arrest for burglary in January of 1984 he was willing to cooperate with police because he was so glad they knew nothing of his other crimes. Serial killers very rarely confess, Steve warned, but said if Horgas could get him to open up it would be by talking about burglary and not the rapes and murders.
After the grand jury handed down the indictment, on their way to Richmond, Horgas and Hill stopped at Spencer’s residence in Arlington. He lived in half of a two-family brick house with his mother and half-brother. His grandmother lived on the other side. Located at the end of a quiet culde-sac, near the site of the first rape, the house was within ten minutes’ walk of the Tuckers’ house.
The detectives explained to Spencer’s mother that they were investigating a burglary that took place over Thanksgiving. They told her someone had seen her son in the area and they wanted to check her house for stolen goods. Although they had no warrant, she understood that her cooperation could help exclude her son as a suspect if they found nothing, so she gave them permission to look around.
After a quick search, all they had was a roll of duct tape, not a match to tape used in Cho’s murder.
Next, they went to Richmond with tactical squad Sergeant Henry Trumble and another detective, Steve Carter. They arrested Timothy Spencer on burglary charges that evening when he returned to Hospitality House from work. He questioned police, wondering why so many cops were involved in his arrest and why the bond was set so high—$350,000—if he was only wanted for burglary. He gave permission for officers to search his room, which yielded nothing specific, although he did have several screwdrivers and a cap and gloves, whose possession was not that unusual in the middle of winter. But on the bottom side of his mattress someone had drawn the infinity symbol—a sideways number eight—
like the one drawn on Cho’s leg.
The suspect was talkative and friendly during the drive back to Arlington. When Horgas asked if he would mind providing a blood sample, though, Spencer asked if it was in connection with a rape. Horgas said it was just to check against a burglary; sometimes a burglar cuts himself breaking in. But as Paul Mones reported, Spencer answered, “No ... if you want my blood, it’s got to have something to do with a rape because I didn’t cut myself going in no house. I didn’t cut myself on no fucking broken window.”
When he learned where the burglary took place, Spencer specifically asked if it had anything to do with the murder he read about in the papers, but Horgas kept playing it cool, per his FBI tips. After hours of interrogation by Horgas and other detectives from Arlington and Richmond over a period of several days, Spencer still had not confessed, nor did he ever. He did, however, give a blood sample that was to prove as telling as anything he might have said.
Initial lab results showed that Timothy Spencer’s blood was consistent with semen stains on Susan Tucker’s nightgown, a match that would only fit thirteen percent of the population. Further, his hair had characteristics matching samples from Tucker’s body and sink. But this wasn’t enough; they’d need DNA to convict.
We began looking into Spencer’s background for hints of what he would become. His parents, both of whom attended some college, divorced when he was seven, after ten years of marriage. His father, a postal employee, reportedly had no contact with the boy after the divorce. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, eventually becoming engaged to a college graduate who had steady work as a bricklayer. Spencer and his mother both stated that family life was good.
But Timmy was always in trouble. At nine, he set a fire in the boys’ bathroom and urinated and defecated in various places throughout his school, causing officials to note his anger and hostility and his need to “prove that he is the one in charge of the situation and not the environment,” eerily portending future attempts to dominate, show control. He was arrested for larceny at nine and eleven, and by fourteen he’d moved into breaking and entering. In school, he consistently performed below his grade level and was left back after the eighth grade. He did not fit in with his classmates, but resented being forced to study in remedial classes. This was all pretty consistent with backgrounds we’d seen during our interviews with serial offenders. By contrast, his brother, Travis, was a good student and outstanding basketball player at the time.
At fifteen, Timmy had trouble with a hit-and-run and joyriding and was sent to a juvenile facility, dropping out of school for good in tenth grade. By the tune he was nineteen he’d been arrested for possession of a concealed weapon, breaking and entering, and probation violation. Throughout the early 1980s he was either serving time for burglary, trespassing, and violation of probation, or living with his grandmother. She felt he made a real effort to change, getting involved in the church and studying for his GED, or high school equivalency diploma.
He had trouble keeping a job, not because he would be fired, but because he would leave after a period of months and move on to another. His work was typically menial: as a janitor or bricklayer. He admitted to regular use of alcohol and marijuana but said he didn’t have a problem with either substance.
A psychologist who studied Spencer in 1983 while he was serving time for burglary and trespassing reported he was “mentally intact, not suffering from delusions or hallucinations,” but had difficulty following rules. According to the report, he “tends to set his own limits as compared to following those set by others.” The psychologist tested his IQ at 89, obviously much lower than Spencer’s capabilities.
After his arrest in January 1984, when he was caught redhanded with stolen coins, he still denied his guilt. A presentencing report noted he “rationalizes his behavior and blames others for his involvement in the instant offenses.”
And he was a good actor. Even as they were interviewing him, at times investigators found him likable. Like a lot of these guys, except when he lost his temper, it was hard to remember what he was capable of doing. That’s why I also stress how important it is to come into these interviews wellprepared and completely familiar with the details of the crimes. Employers characterized him as a friendly loner. His girlfriend, who’d been dating him since the previous October and reportedly saw him every weekend, described him the same way. She denied anything unusual about their sex life—no masks or devices—and did not believe her boyfriend could be a killer. That, of course, was not unusual, either.
Only one ex-girlfriend had anything of potential interest to report. A prostitute, she said Spencer once advised her she could use Vaseline if she ever had trouble with vaginal dryness and admitted to her he enjoyed masturbating, despite his assertion to Joe Horgas that he had “never jacked off,” when Horgas confronted him with the fact that semen had been found on and around the bodies. Investigators were never able to establish a relationship between Spencer and any of his victims, although two witnesses could place him on a local bus that went to Cloverleaf Mall. The key to the case was the scientific evidence.
DNA testing took until early March to complete but the results were dramatic: Spencer’s blood matched semen samples from the Tucker, Davis, and Hellams crime scenes, as well as one of the early rapes in Arlington. His defense attorneys, Carl Womack and Thomas Kelley, had Cellmark Diagnostics Inc.—a prominent lab in Maryland which would later analyze the samples in the O.J. Simpson murder trial—independently do a blind check on the results of the DNA tests, hoping for a discrepancy. But the experts concurred with Lifecodes’s findings. The odds that Spencer’s DNA matched another black person’s in North America—and police held the wrong guy—was said to be 135 million to one.
In addition to the DNA testing, the local lab in Fairfax processed Spencer’s clothing, including a camouflage jacket he reportedly wore every day. Senior forensic scientist Joseph Beckerman matched trace particles of glass from the jacket to glass in one of the basement windows broken by the subject.
On July 16, 1988, Timothy Spencer was found guilty in the rape and capital murder of Susan Tucker. Although they were not considered in the trial, the murders in Richmond could be brought into the penalty phase, and Debbie Davis’s father testified on his dead daughter’s birthday.
Spencer’s mother testified on his behalf, as did the leader of a community center and a former teacher. Both spoke of his troubled youth. Finally, Spencer briefly told the jury he did not murder anyone and “felt sorry for their families.” The jury deliberated three hours before unanimously recommending a sentence of death.
In October of 1988, Spencer was also found guilty in the murder of Debbie Davis. He was convicted in Susan Hellams’s murder in January of 1989, and in Diane Cho’s in June 1989. The Davis and Hellams cases used the DNA results, but there were no pure DNA samples from the Cho murder scene. Prosecutors in that trial argued the case as a “signature crime,” which by law allowed them to introduce evidence from the other murders.
On April 27, 1994, after the failure of several appeals, Timothy Wilson Spencer died in the Virginia electric chair, the first person in the world to receive the death sentence by virtue of DNA identification. Even at the end, he never confessed his guilt. Steve Mardigian drove down U.S. 95 to the state penitentiary in Jarratt, not far from the North Carolina border, to try to interview Spencer shortly before his execution. But Spencer refused to talk or admit anything.
Ironically, despite the state-of-the-art techniques and computers that aided in getting a conviction, the case against Timothy Spencer was truly made by old-fashioned, streetcop detective work. If Joe Horgas hadn’t remembered Spencer’s name it never would have come up in the exhaustive computer search because of the technicality that Spencer was not considered paroled or released by corrections officials. There would have been no blood to test.
David Vasquez, though, was still in prison, having confessed to the murder of Carolyn Hamm. The two original witnesses would not ch
ange their story, the lab samples had degraded too much over time to be definitive, and no one could corroborate Vasquez’s alibi.
After his meeting with Jud and Joe Horgas in Arlington, Steve Mardigian had begun the laborious task of analyzing all of the relevant case materials in the Tucker and Hamm murders in Arlington, the murders in Richmond and Chesterfield County, and each separate sexual assault and burglary. All significant data was entered into a computer program to provide a detailed comparison of physical characteristics and verbal behavior.
“That’s when the real work started,” says Steve. “One of the things we were asking was, ’How do we determine whether the man in custody had anything to do with the Carolyn Hamm case?’”
Mardigian created a grid with such headings as Name of Victim, Jurisdiction, Date, Duration of Crime, Type of Location, Type of Weapon, Type of Binding, Method and Place of Injuries, Initial Contact with Victim, Had Offender Gained Entry Prior to Victim Coming Home?, Location of Assault—Inside, Outside, or in Vehicle, Was Victim Moved Throughout the Residence?, Dialogue and Verbal Behavior in Rapes, Type of Sexual Activity.
Steve then brought the data to me and we each analyzed it independently before coming together for our conclusions. It was clear to both of us that his and Jud’s original supposition was correct: there was no question that this was one person acting alone rather than two working together—either two partners such as Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris or a sadistic leader and a compliant follower such as Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Vasquez’s supposed partner was a ghost.
These crimes—the burglaries, the rapes, and the murders—were all committed by someone with experience, criminal sophistication, and organizational skills. He had the ability to interact for long periods with his victims and took sexual pleasure in manipulating them, dominating them, controlling them, and torturing them. David Vasquez was not a sexual sadist, he didn’t have the organizational or interpersonal skills to interact with the victims the way this guy did, and we both felt there was absolutely no way he could have committed these crimes.