Journey into Darkness (11 page)

My experience has shown me that the public is very often a critical partner with the police in bringing dangerous men to justice. So while it is often a good idea to withhold certain specific facts and pieces of information, my own bias is that you work with the media and let the public help you as much as possible.

In addition to following up leads and following forensic clues, the Green Ribbon task force contacted the FBI, specifically Special Agent Chuck Wagner of the Buffalo, New York, Field Office. Buffalo is right over the border from the southern end of the Golden Horseshoe and the field office had always had a good, mutually beneficial relationship with
local Canadian police agencies as well as the national RCMP—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Chuck, the profile coordinator for the field office, in turn called Gregg McCrary at the Investigative Support Unit in Quantico.

We’d organized the unit so that each agent would have primary responsibility for a particular geographic territory. Gregg, a former high school teacher and black belt in the Asian martial art of Shorinji Kempo, had been a field agent in New York before we brought him to Quantico.

As soon as he took a look at the cases, Gregg was struck by the location where Kristen French’s body had been dumped, very near the grave of Leslie Mahaffy. Leslie had been taken from Burlington and dumped near St. Catharines. Kristen was abducted in St. Catharines and left near Burlington. He didn’t think that was coincidental. Either the crimes truly were related or the UNSUB wanted the police to believe they were. In any event, Kristen’s killer clearly was reacting to the Mahaffy murder.

To Gregg, both murders had all the earmarks of stranger homicide. There was nothing to suggest that the killer or killers knew either girl personally, though both were probably surveilled and stalked beforehand. These were high-risk crimes for the perpetrator. Kristen was grabbed in broad daylight from a church parking lot in view of witnesses. Leslie was taken at her own house from under her parents’ bedroom window.

When we see this type of crime, the first thing we think of is a somewhat younger, unsophisticated, perhaps disorganized offender with a highly developed sexual fantasy that he is increasingly desperate to act out. For this reason, when we see a high-risk crime, we expect the victim to be kept alive for a relatively longer period of time, which the medical examiner told us had been the case with Kristen French.

But eyewitness accounts had spoken of two offenders, which changed the profile considerations. If two people were involved in a high-risk, daylight abduction, the evaluation changes and we’d boost the sophistication level significantly. The fantasy aspect remains just as important, but now it appears to be planned, organized, and carried out by older, more criminally experienced individuals. The stalking and surveillance of girls at both high schools spoke to this as
well. This type of crime perpetrated by a sole offender would likely be his first. Two people committing the same crime speaks to a more evolved and developed MO.

The body disposal methods in the two main murders under consideration were very different, suggesting the possibility of two separate killers. All things considered, though, Gregg thought this unlikely. More likely, the killer was getting bolder and/or smarter. He’d obviously gone to a lot of trouble and effort to dismember the body, mix and mold the concrete, put the blocks in a car, and drive it to Lake Gibson. In spite of all that work, the body had been found and identified relatively quickly. So next time, why bother? Another possible explanation for the change in this part of the MO was that the killer was growing more confident, flaunting his work to the police, letting them know that he was the same one who had killed Leslie Mahaffy and was therefore “burying” his latest prey nearby. Whichever was the explanation, or if both were correct, what was clear was that he was escalating, that he had begun to act out his fantasies and had convinced or coerced another person into working with him.

The cutting off of Kristen’s long hair and the evidence of sexual assaults on her body indicated a man with a hatred or contempt for women, an emotional need to degrade them in order to feel powerful or even adequate. This man would likely have difficulty with normal sexual function and if he had an ongoing relationship with a wife or girlfriend, he’d have the need to sexually dominate or degrade her in a similar fashion.

A couple of years before, Gregg had profiled an UNSUB in a series of murders of prostitutes and homeless women in Rochester, New York. From the facts he knew, Gregg had predicted the man would have some sort of sexual dysfunction, possibly on the order of erectile insufficiency. A further escalation of behavior in later crimes led Gregg to suggest secretly surveilling a newly discovered body dump site to which he felt the killer would return. This strategy ultimately led to the capture of Arthur Shawcross, who was convicted of multiple counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to 250 years to life. Interviews with other prostitutes Shawcross had visited revealed that he was unable to
maintain erection or achieve orgasm unless they played dead.

Gregg predicted that if there were two offenders working as partners as seemed to be the case, then one would be the dominant leader and the other would always be a subservient follower. Double offenders in rape and sexual murder aren’t common, but we have seen and studied them, going back to Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, who together terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s as the “Hillside Strangler,” and even before that, James Russell Odom and James Clayton Lawson, Jr., who met at Atascadero State Mental Hospital in California where they were both doing time for rape.

Clay Lawson would while away the time describing to Russell Odom the tortures he’d like to inflict on captured women when he got out. He himself wasn’t interested in intercourse. But Odom was, and, upon his release in 1974, sought out Lawson in South Carolina. Within a few nights they had kidnapped, raped, killed, and horribly mutilated a young woman working in a 7-Eleven they stopped in. The victim’s body was left in plain view and the killers were arrested within days. The terrified, submissive Odom admitted raping the girl but denied having any part in the murder. He was found guilty of rape, unlawful weapon possession, and accessory before and after the fact of murder. The dominant Lawson, who chewed chalk in the courtroom during his own separate trial, adamantly denied taking part in the rape, saying, “I only wanted to destroy her.” He was convicted of murder in the first degree and electrocuted by the state of South Carolina in 1976.

If it is possible to conceive of a more depraved partnership, it would be Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. Like Odom and Lawson, they met behind bars, in this case the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, where they discovered their mutual affinity for dominating, hurting, and sexually abusing young women. When they were both paroled in 1979, they got together in Los Angeles and made plans to undertake a project to kidnap, rape, torture, and kill one teenaged girl of each age, thirteen through nineteen. They had successfully carried out their plan against five girls in a brutal and horrifying manner, when the sixth managed
to escape after being raped and went to the police. Norris was the submissive one in this team and he was the one who caved in to police interrogation, confessing and fingering his dominant partner to escape the gas chamber. He also led police to the various bodies. One skeleton still had Bittaker’s ice pick protruding from its ear opening. The unrepentant Bittaker, among the vilest human beings I have ever come across, became something of a celebrity on California’s death row. When asked for his autograph by admiring fellow prisoners, he would sign it “Pliers Bittaker” after one of his favorite instruments of torture.

This is not to say an offender of this type is incapable of deep and genuine emotion. Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole and I had the opportunity to interview Bittaker at San Quentin. We thought it significant that during the several hours we were with him, Bittaker never once made eye contact with Mary Ellen. He would not look at her. Yet when we brought up the crimes he cried. Big, tough Lawrence Bittaker shed tears of sorrow. But he was crying not for the lost lives of his victims, but for the fact that his life was ruined by having been caught.

Gregg McCrary saw the dominant one of Kristen French’s killers in much the same way. He would be between the ages of twenty-five to early thirties, which squared with witness descriptions. He would be first and foremost a human predator, a born manipulator who would get by in life by exploiting people and systems. Like Lawrence Bittaker or Clay Lawson and unlike Alison Parrott’s killer, he would feel no guilt or remorse for the suffering of the victim, her family, or the community. Each successful kill would only fuel his appetite for inflicting more pain and shedding more blood.

This dominance would carry over into his personal life. Many sexual sadists are married or in ongoing relationships with women. If this were the case with the UNSUB, he would probably beat and sexually abuse his own mate. Small, ordinary things like questioning his comings or goings would be enough to trigger his wrath.

There would be prior sexual offenses in his background, beginning either with flashing or being a Peeping Tom, eventually escalating into sexual assaults for which he may or may not have been arrested. But someone, either his wife
or girlfriend or partner in crime, would know about this history. Gregg felt he would probably work at some sort of manual skill, possibly with power tools or in a metal shop, and would have his own shop at home. And finally, there would have been some Stressor which triggered his initial homicidal rage. Perhaps his wife finally threw him out of the house. Perhaps he lost a job or suffered some serious professional setback. Perhaps both.

As police looked for the cream-colored Camaro and followed up every tip, the investigation dragged on without much progress. Not wanting to let the case grow cold and stale, the Green Ribbon task force decided to go public, which we at Quantico had been advocating for some time.

On the evening of Tuesday, July 21, 1992, television station CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, broadcast an extraordinary program, which was simultaneously picked up by other stations throughout Canada for a national airing. Entitled “The Abduction of Kristen French,” the program featured Green Ribbon chief Vince Bevan and Sergeant Kate Cavanagh, the Ontario Provincial Police Department profiler, as well as Chuck Wagner and Gregg McCrary on a feed from Quantico.

Using police reports, diagrams, eyewitness accounts, and re-creations of the Camaro’s reported position at various points in the crime, “The Abduction of Kristen French” had as its goal finally going public with the major details of the case in the hopes that a viewer would recognize something that could get the investigation moving. For the first time publicly, police revealed the witness accounts of the two men seen in the car and presumed to be involved in the kidnapping. A phone bank staffed by trained volunteers took called-in tips throughout the program and in the weeks following the broadcast. Using the clue of the map found at the crime scene, one of the first things Bevan and host Dan McLean did was urge people to call in about any adult male in the area around that time who had aroused their suspicion by asking for directions or help. One of the main focuses was on trying to locate the car, which could then be traced back to an owner.

When Gregg McCrary came on about halfway through the broadcast, he went over the main points of his profile,
explaining what the various behavioral clues suggested about this UNSUBin his mid-twenties to early thirties who was already a seasoned sexual criminal. Cutting off Kristen’s beautiful dark hair indicated his emotional need to humiliate and degrade women to cover for his own personal and sexual inadequacy. Then he outlined the typical relationship between dominant and submissive partners in sexual crime. He explained what to look for in the offender’s behavior and how it would have changed recognizably to those around him in the days and weeks after Kristen was taken.

Essentially, there would be a total disruption in his (or their) normal life from April 16 to at least April 30, the day her body was found. We knew Kristen was still alive up until very close to that date, which meant the UNSUB would have been preoccupied feeding, maintaining, and monitoring her wherever he kept her imprisoned, as well as repeatedly assaulting her according to the dictates of his fantasy. This disruption didn’t necessarily mean he’d miss work all during that time if, in fact, he had a steady job, but it would mean that he would be preoccupied, stressed, and his demeanor would be noticeably different to friends and co-workers. He would be following the investigation and press reports very closely, and would engage frequently in discussions of the case and the progress—or lack thereof—the police were making. If he were in an ongoing relationship with a woman, that relationship would also be more stressful than usual; there would be more frequent and severe flare-ups of temper and he would be even more abusive.

The main purpose of our profiles is to let observers recognize behavior and help identify an UNSUB. By increasing the amount of information available to the public, we’re potentially letting the people closest to the UNSUB become profilers themselves.

Almost all sexual serial killers, particularly of the organized variety, will follow closely what the media reports about the investigation. When we go in on a search warrant, we’re not surprised to see scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and videotapes of news reports in the offender’s possession. We therefore assumed Kristen’s killer or killers would be tuned in to this highly publicized broadcast. So at one point Dan McLean asked Gregg what the killer would be feeling.

“Stress,” Gregg replied, none of it having to do with feelings of guilt or remorse, but real worry over the possibility of discovery and apprehension.

“And if you are watching,” Gregg declared, speaking directly to Kristen French’s unknown killer, “I want to tell you that you are going to be apprehended. It’s just a question of when.”