Journey into Darkness (14 page)

Undoubtedly, he would have gotten blood on himself during the struggle, which means he would have gone home immediately afterward to bathe, clean himself off, and probably destroy the clothes he was wearing. Anyone observing this post-offense behavior would know something was wrong. They would also notice the change in his normal behavior, which would become tense, overly rigid; he’d have trouble sleeping, rely more on alcohol or cigarettes. If he lived in the neighborhood he would be questioned by the police. To deflect suspicion away from himself he would be overly solicitous and cooperative, and in other ways would attempt to inject himself into the investigation to keep up with its progress. This is not someone who planned to kill, so he would not have had an elaborate plan to avoid detection. He will not leave the area if he thinks he is at all under suspicion because he would perceive this as evidence of his guilt. Someone around him may have noticed his need to go back to the dump site and he would have offered some excuse why he had to do this.

I also outlined a number of proactive techniques I thought might help get the UNSUB to reveal himself. I gave the detectives the tape the next morning and they had it transcribed right away.

The reason Shephard and Fitzpatrick were so interested in what I had to say, I soon learned, was that one of the subjects they had interviewed fit my profile almost exactly. His name was Guy Paul Morin, he was in his late twenties, and he lived with his parents in the house next door to the Jessops’. He was interested in music, played the clarinet in the community band, and Christine knew him well. There
was good forensic evidence, too, including blood, paint chips from his house, and fibers from Christine’s clothing.

He was arrested and changed in April 1985, though the police weren’t able to get a confession during interrogation. I think there was a lot of mixed feeling in the neighborhood, too. Christine had to have been killed by a stranger. No one who knew her could possibly do this to her. Guy Morin just didn’t look or act like a monster.

Neither, for that matter, did Paul Bernardo.

In addition to the forensic evidence, police eventually sent an undercover cop into the jail where Morin was being held, posing as a fellow prisoner and his cellmate, a tactic that was legal in Canada. The cop later testified at the first trial that Morin had made statements that strongly suggested guilt, which Morin then denied.

The history of the case from that point forward became strange and unsettling. Ultimately, it led to the divorce of Christine’s parents, the financial ruin of Morin’s parents, and serious illness for his father. In what turned out to be Morin’s first trial in London, Ontario, early in 1986, Morin pleaded not guilty, but in the middle of the proceedings his lawyer stated that if the jury decided he was guilty, then they should find insanity. However, the jury found insufficient evidence and acquitted him.

The Crown Attorney appealed, in itself an unusual move, and in June 1987 the Ontario Court of Appeals overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial. The following year, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the appeals court ruling.

Late in 1991 a second six-month trial began, the result of which was a guilty verdict after eight days of deliberation. He was sent to Kingston Penitentiary.

But then in 1995, DNA testing, not available at the time of the murder, indicated that Morin’s DNA from a blood sample did not match that of the semen found in Christine’s underwear. He was released from prison and acquitted of murder. The Christine Jessop murder is an open case once again.

As law enforcement officers as well as parents, we hate to see messy, ambiguous results like this. Do I still think Guy Paul Morin is guilty of Christine Jessop’s murder? That’s for a court of law to decide, not me. No one in my
unit ever claims to be able to deliver up the name and identity of a particular UNSUB. All we can do is describe the type of individual we think did it based on the information we’re given and what kind of pre- and post-offense behavior we would expect to see. In that way, we hope to be able to help investigators narrow down their list of suspects. I still believe firmly that her killer was someone who lived in the neighborhood, knew her well, was interested in music, and was an immature loner with a self-image problem who hung around with people younger than himself.

I also believe that so much time has passed, custody of evidence may have been compromised over the years and the crime scene, body, and clothing were in such a poor state to begin with that I would have serious doubts at this point about the infallibility of any scientific testing.

In addition, a number of sordid and very troubling revelations have come to light since the first trial, including the fact that Christine’s brother, Kenneth, three years older than she, and several of his friends had been sexually abusing her since she was four. Appalling as it is to contemplate, I don’t think we can be certain where the semen deposits in her underwear originated. The DNA evidence might just be a large red herring in this case, as occasionally happens.

Whatever the explanation in the Jessop case, I’m afraid this might be one of those tragic instances in which truth and justice will always be elusive.

Of all the things I’ve had to deal with in my career, violent crimes against children are unquestionably the worst. Once you’ve seen the murder scenes and the crime scene photos, it never leaves you. Seeing what I have seen, knowing what I know is out there, my first instinct when my children were younger was to handcuff each of them to my own or my wife, Pam’s, wrists and never let them out of our sight.

The problem is how to strike a balance between being overbearingly protective and allowing your children room to mature and develop their independence. I was a nervous wreck the first time Erika took the car out alone or went on her first date. One of my closest friends in the unit, normally a very easygoing guy with a fine sense of humor, practically interrogates his daughter’s dates before he lets them out of the house. We’ve all just seen too much.

The best we can hope for as parents, I suppose, is to remain alert, to remain cognizant, to teach our children well without making them fearful of every shadow. We have to set a standard of behavior and integrity while letting them know that they can always come and tell us anything. And I’ll be the first to admit, that’s not an easy balance to strike.

Cassandra Lynn Hansen, known as Cassie, was a six-year-old girl from Eagan, Minnesota, a southern suburb of St. Paul. She was a year older than my daughter Erika, and seeing a picture of her with brownish blond hair cascading down below her shoulders made me think at once of an adorable little pixie. Her dimpled smile looked as if it would brighten the darkest day.

On the evening of November 10, 1981, she was attending a family night service with her mother and younger sister in the basement of Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church in St. Paul. She told her mother she had to go to the bathroom, then went down the hall and up the stairway to find the ladies’ room. On the stairway she was seen by a woman church member. She was not seen alive again. When she didn’t return, her mother, Ellen, went to the ladies’ room, turned on the lights and looked around. It was empty. She went outside the church and repeatedly called her daughter’s name. Other people took up the search. When they still couldn’t find Cassie, they called the police.

The next morning, her body, still clothed in the Baby blue dress she’d been wearing, was discovered tucked in the corner of a Dumpster behind an auto repair shop on Grand Avenue, about three miles from the church. Her black patent leather buckle shoes were found separately about two blocks away. The only other items not accounted for were the barrettes she’d had in her hair.

The murder of this little girl was among the most heartrending cases I’ve ever encountered. It also demonstrated some of the best uses of proactive strategies and involvement of dedicated and courageous citizens I’ve ever known.

The Twin Cities public immediately reacted to Cassie’s murder with horror, revulsion, and sorrow. If a sweet and joyful little child could be abducted from a church service, from a house of God, and have her life snuffed out, then was anything sacred?

The medical examiner found no evidence that she’d been sexually assaulted, though small traces of semen and several pubic hairs were discovered on one thigh of her navy blue tights. The semen revealed blood type O, a good piece of information since Cassie’s blood type was B. The cause of death was ligature strangulation, probably with a two-anda-half-inch-wide belt, based on the bruises on her neck. Abrasions across her chest indicated that another belt had been used as a restraint around her upper body. And there was one more detail the police kept secret as a “control” and to disqualify any false confessions: the six-year-old had been scratched and beaten about the head and face.

Cassie’s parents were separated and she had lived with her mother. Police quickly determined that neither parent was a suspect. Ellen told investigators that Cassie had been taught to scream if she felt threatened by a stranger, and she had clearly grasped the significance of this lesson. Not too long before, Cassie had seen her four-year-old sister, Vanessa, talking to someone she didn’t know and had pulled her forcefully back into the house.

As is often the case, witness accounts were somewhat contradictory and confusing. The church member who had seen Cassie on the stairs also remembered seeing a white male somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age with “saltand-pepper” gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses on a rough face. A realtor who was on the street less than a block from the church after Cassie disappeared said he spotted a white male in his twenties carrying a motionless child who appeared to be a female, six or seven years old. Later, a similar description was taken near the alley leading to the Dumpster where Cassie’s body was found.

The St. Paul Police Department pursued the case rigorously,
employed the services of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, and developed some promising leads. But through the Christmas holidays and into the new year, they hadn’t been able to make an arrest. Everybody wanted this one. Everybody wanted to find the killer of this little girl.

Late in February of 1982, Special Agents Bill Hagmaier and Brent Frost in Minneapolis got in touch with me and asked me to profile the case. This was the first time I’d ever worked with Bill, and it turned out to be a fortuitous meeting. Within a year, he had been transferred to the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. When I was near death in Seattle in December of 1983, Bill organized a collection to bring my wife and father out to the hospital to be with me. He later joined my Investigative Support Unit and was a key member until I retired in the spring of 1995. He now heads the Serial Killer and Child Abduction Unit at Quantico.

On March 3, after analyzing all the relevant case materials, I offered my profile in a lengthy conference call with Bill and Brent and the key St. Paul police people on the case: Captain Donald Trooien was chief of the homicide and sex crimes unit and had attended a sex crimes investigation seminar at Quantico in January where he heard a presentation from my Investigative Support Unit. Also on the line were Deputy Chief Robert LaBath, Lieutenant Larry McDonald, and Sergeants Roger Needham and Darrell Schmidt. As was our custom at Quantico, the one thing I did not want from the investigators was any information on suspects they might have developed. I wanted to remain objective, my profile based solely on what the evidence suggested to me.

Given the nature of the crime itself—an abduction in a church—I felt we were dealing with a white male UNSUB with a long history of obsession with children, perhaps a lifelong pattern. This crime was almost certainly committed by someone of the same race as Cassie and was not a casual, opportunistic off-the-street grab, though the abduction itself was a crime of opportunity. This guy was frequenting places where he knew children would be present, where he could freely observe them and be near them, and where parents’ guard would be down. Age is always among the toughest points to nail down in a profile because emotional or experiential
age doesn’t always match chronological years. But although experience had shown us that a predictable time for the manifestation of child obsession disorders was early to mid-twenties, I thought the offender would be in at least his early thirties. I warned, however, that this wasn’t necessarily something to go on. Four months before this, I had finished up work on the notorious “Trailside Killer” case, involving the murder of women hiking in densely wooded parks just north of San Francisco. The particulars indicated a white male around thirty or so. When David Carpenter, an industrial arts teacher in San Jose, was arrested for the crimes, he was fifty. But he had first been incarcerated for sex crimes in his mid-twenties, just about the time we would have predicted. At any rate, regardless of his age, I expected Cassandra Hansen’s killer to have a previous history of sex offenses involving children, though they’d be far less serious than murder. He was able to get her out of the church quickly and efficiently, which spoke to a certain level of sophistication and maturity. He may have even gotten some thrill out of the challenge of getting her out of there. (I’ve interviewed a number of child molesters who said that they really got off on the challenge of spiriting a child out of a crowded shopping mall without anyone noticing or stopping them.)

At the same time that the circumstances showed some criminal maturity and sophistication, the choice of a child victim definitely showed an inability to deal with peers in an age-appropriate manner. This type of individual would not have been able to have his way with an eighteen-year-old or someone closer to his own age. He could only do it with a helpless child. He happened to abduct and kill a little girl. I think Cassie represented his victim of choice, but he easily could have done the same to a little boy, if that were the available victim. In spite of this, he still could be married or be with a woman, but it would not be a mature or deep relationship and I wouldn’t be surprised to find the woman to be dependent or immature herself. Arthur Shawcross, who raped and murdered prostitutes in Rochester, New York, had served a previous fifteen-year jail term (much too short, in my opinion) for the assault and murder of both a young boy and a young girl. At the time of the prostitute
murders, Shawcross was employed, married, and had a steady girlfriend.