Crime Seen (8 page)

One time I was participating in an unsolved homicide consultation involving a female victim, and one of my male colleagues voiced his belief that there was a sexual component to the crime because the fully dressed victim had her underpants on inside out. He believed the victim must have at some point during the crime had her underpants taken off and that they were accidentally turned inside out in the process of the offender re-dressing her. From my vantage point I saw no confirmed sexual component in this at all. I had to speak up and confess that on more than one occasion I had discovered that I had come to work with my underpants on inside out. I even admitted to once attending a new assignment interview and not realizing until after it was over that I had been wearing one brown shoe and one black shoe. There were a few snickers but my point was taken.

Crime-scene analysis and reconstruction were grounded in the five Ws: who the victim was, what happened to them, and when, where and why it occurred. It was the last “W,” the criminal’s motivation, that visiting police were usually having trouble pinning down. Using information provided by ongoing research from the FBI and their partners, we could also explore characteristics of other offenders who had committed similar types of crimes in the past. But when working on a criminal profile there’s no such thing as a cookie-cutter approach: individuals and circumstances define the intricacies of each case. Our instructors always emphasized that the profile was a series of opinions, based on the information available at the time the profile was constructed. Investigators needed to keep an open mind and remain objective as they moved through their case and developed further leads and suspects.

Since day one, in addition to his coordinator duties and teaching some of our fellowship classes, Ed Sulzbach was a great ambassador for the State of Virginia, making sure we visited Civil War battle sites, the Blue Ridge Mountains and other attractions. One that Bronwyn and I appreciated discovering was Potomac Mills, one of the largest malls in the country. Sometimes Ed would be out of town for a few weeks working cases, but he’d always hunt us down as soon as he got back, checking in to see how we were doing, and that we had everything we needed. It was always a welcome break from the Academy and its cafeteria food when Ed and his wife, Peggy, invited me and my classmates to dinner at their home in Richmond.

At one of those dinners we were joined by the author Patricia Cornwell, who lived in Richmond. At Ed’s suggestion, I bought a copy of her then recently published first book,
Postmortem
, and brought it with me for her to sign. Patsy (as Ed called her) had spent many hours with Ed and others in the BSU, which she said helped in the development of her FBI and police characters for her book. The dedication in her book read,
For Ed, Special Agent and Special Friend
, and I could relate to that sentiment. Not long after, Ed was transferred back to the Richmond FBI field office. I knew he was anxious to get back to fieldwork, but I would miss his guidance and friendship.

*
Over subsequent years the BSU underwent several name changes and reorganizations in accordance with the growing specialized services they provided. For simplicity, I continue to refer to it as the BSU.

STANDING

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT JUDSON RAY
took over as the new fellowship coordinator after Ed left. Judd continued with organizing our course of studies and casework assignments as well as bringing in other members of the unit to give overviews of their work on the high-profile and headline-grabbing atrocities of the day.

Judd’s sharing of some of his own tumultuous personal stories was as interesting and educational about life as they were about work. They could be a bit crude, but Judd told them the way they happened. Sometimes they were delivered around the table in the conference room, other times over more than a few cold Samuel Adams beers in “The Boardroom” bar.

Judd grew up in the segregated South of the 1950s. A railway ran through the centre of his hometown of Clayton, North Carolina. The tracks were what separated the blacks from the whites. Judd said, “Whites goes here and coloureds goes there. We knew our place.”

There were twelve in Judd’s family and they lived off share-cropping. Judd’s world changed forever when his mother died when he was thirteen. “Her death started the disintegration of our family. It was a turbulent time for me. I felt like my ability to ever love anything or anybody leaked into that coffin with her.”

Judd and his siblings were all separated when sent to live with different relatives in the area. He dropped out of school but later returned and did a short stint in college until he ran out of money after the first semester. He returned home and took a job as a janitor at the local state college campus.

“After about a month, this tall white basketball player came up to me when I was cleaning the athletic dorm. He said he’d been watching me and I shouldn’t be cleaning floors and be a janitor for the rest of my life. He told me that I ought to be in college. I knew he wasn’t talking about this college because blacks weren’t allowed. I told him I had been to the blacks’ college but ran out of money.”

The student suggested to Judd that he go into the army and they would send him to college. The downside was he would probably have to do a stint in Vietnam. Judd didn’t know anything about the army and hadn’t even heard of the Vietnam War. “Well I thought it can’t be any worse than it is right here.” He took the advice to heart and several days later enlisted. It was 1966 and Judd was just nineteen years old.

After basic training Judd was sent to Vietnam for a year. His description of the war’s impact on him was surprising to me. “Probably some of the best times of my life were spent in that regiment with those men. It’s the first time I ever got a sense of belonging—that there’s something, some purpose. There was a lot of discipline there that I probably needed.

“During those years of living on the other side of the tracks I’d seen my share of people dying in the street. A cousin of mine, they called her ‘Big Ann,’ one night she was shot and killed and she died in my arms. I was only about fourteen. So being in Vietnam, and sounds kind of crazy, but to me the whole idea of dying and death and stuff like that was not a big deal because I had seen it.

“A lot of the other young boys who went over to Vietnam had never even been in a fist fight so it wasn’t surprising to me that some of those young ones came back home shattered and had problems with what they saw.”

When Judd got back home, he left the army and, in 1968, married a woman whom he had met in the base cafeteria. He had heard Washington, DC, police were looking for officers and was hired right after the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

“I was broken in by an old sergeant. He would have these tidbits of information about how to police. One day we were up on ‘I’ Street and he says, ‘You see those girls there?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘Those are prostitutes.’ I says, ‘I know what a prostitute is.’ He says, ‘What you don’t know is what I’m gettin’ ready to tell ya. Now as a policeman, they have a lot of information. They’re out here. They can be your eyes, ears and they can tell you a lot of stuff. You don’t even have to pay them as informers because every now and then you bust one for soliciting and you won’t take her to jail and she’ll owe you. My point is this. If you’re going to work ’em, you can’t fuck ’em. If you’re going to fuck ’em, you can’t work ’em.’ That kind of stuck with me about people in general as I kind of came through the policing process.

“You have to declare yourself in terms of what you are and what you stand for and what ditch you’re willing to die in. I think Martin Luther King had it right and this is really true with law enforcement. At least it was when I came through. If you haven’t figured out that which you’re willing to die for, you’re not really fit to live. If you don’t know what you’d die for … it’s almost like if you don’t know where you stand, you’ll sit anywhere.” Judd hadn’t got King’s inspirational quote quite right but he surely understood the spirit of it.

Judd also worked for a time with the Columbus Police Department in Georgia. He met BSU agents Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas when they were working together on a serial murder case in Columbus and that eventually led to Judd joining the FBI. Several years later John asked Judd if he’d be interested in coming to work in the BSU. Judd jumped at the chance. He was the unit’s first black member and one of a very few agents working there with such an extensive violent crime investigation background. He was one of the first in the unit to be qualified as an expert criminal profiling witness in a US court.

By the time I arrived for my fellowship training, Judd was a veteran unit member and one of their top profilers. He was not involved in any major research initiatives, but strictly worked cases. Judd often used his own solved cases to demonstrate the behavioural theories and principles he taught. He always stressed the importance of a methodical crime-scene analysis and a full reconstruction of the events that had occurred in the crime scene before providing any opinion about what had occurred or the type of person likely responsible.

Judd also taught me the concept of crime-scene “staging,” that is, the purposeful altering of a scene to misdirect an investigation. The manipulation of a homicide scene to make the death appear to be something else, such as a suicide or an accident, could be indicative of the killer having some type of relationship with the victim. The killer may think he will be a suspect and feel the need to change the scene so that it looks like a motivation other than personal.

Judd usually took out a folder full of photographs and police reports to exhibit a teaching point, but on one occasion all he had with him was a tape recorder. This time, he was neither the investigator nor the profiler for the case study—he was the victim.

It happened after he had finished his FBI new agents training years earlier. He and his wife had just moved to Atlanta with their two young daughters, one eight years old and the other eighteen months. On February 21, 1981, Judd’s wife made spaghetti for dinner. After they had finished eating she told him she was going over to her aunt’s house with their two kids. “I was feeling a little sleepy after dinner so I lay down. I woke up around ten p.m. and she still wasn’t home with the kids so I went to bed. About eleven thirty I wake up hearing a click-click sound. It was right by my head. I come off the bed and somebody bounds out of the bedroom.” Judd would find out later that two men had broken into his house. One came into the bedroom and held a gun to his head as he slept. Judd had awakened to the sound of the gun misfiring. This man fled the scene after it happened, but the other remained.

“The next thing a gunshot goes off in the bedroom but it misses me. There’s some light coming in the room but I can’t make out what the hell is going on. Another shot rings out and hits me in the left arm. Instantly I know that somebody is in here trying to kill me. I guess all of the training kind of floods back. I try to give the guy a very narrow target so I turn sideways on the bed instead of being broadsided.

“Now I know that I’ve got a situation here. I started talking to the guy. I said, ‘Hey man you got the wrong house. What do you want? Just take what you want. I’m not going to give you any reason to kill me.’ The guy never says a word. I could see his silhouetted body but I couldn’t make out whether the guy is white or black or anything. I realized that I’m hit and I’m talking to the guy and then something goes, ‘Man you better be quiet because you may be only directing his fire.’ So I shut up and then … I’m going, ‘This son of a bitch may think that I’m dying so he’s going to come in now and finish the job.’

“I start trying to move to the end of this king-size bed. I was thinking, ‘This guy is bent on killing me. He wants to get this job done.’ My .38 department service revolver is locked up in the bedroom but I can’t get to it. And I’m thinking, ‘The cops are gonna come in here tomorrow and think this fucking guy never put up a fight about this.’ So that was driving me too.

“I started inching my way to the side of the bed and he says, ‘Don’t move.’ So I knew that he knew what my plans were. At least I thought he knew. I kept going and fell off the bed. I’m now facing down on the floor with my right hand caught underneath me. He jumps on the bed and fires one shot, point-blank. The bullet comes through my back, right through my lung, and misses my spine by about an eighth of an inch. The bullet comes out through my chest and through my right hand that was tucked underneath me. I’m bleeding out.

“I remember him putting his damn hands on me like he’s checking for a pulse or something. I remember him saying, ‘There, motherfucker, die.’ Then I hear footsteps walking out of the bedroom.

“I’m lying there hyperventilating because my lung is shot. And I’m pinching myself going, ‘Shit I’m dreaming.’ I’m thinking I’m doing combat in Vietnam. I never dreamed about Vietnam before. Something was saying, ‘Get up, get up, get up.’ So I got up and I’m staggering around the room but I can’t breathe. Blood is goin’ all over the place. So then I lay back at the foot of the bed. I remember thinking I hope this is the last breath because it was getting very, very painful to try to breathe. You can’t breathe. I was panicking basically. I lay back down across the bed and I was convinced I was gonna die.

“Then something again said get up and get some water. You don’t have to die. So I staggered around walking through my own blood and leaving blood on everything I touched. Finally I made it into the bathroom. No lights on at all. Turned the faucet on trying to get water and I can’t get it. So I pressed the switch to turn the light on. Then I see this fuckin’ hand completely splattered, bone sticking up. Now I’m back in touch with reality. I know exactly what happened. I’m bleeding like hell. I know I’ve got to elevate my hand. I’m in a fix because I can’t think how to do this. Plus I think the son of a bitch is still somewhere inside the house. Something says call the police. So I did.”