Journey into Darkness (15 page)

I told the investigators I thought the church location had a major bearing on the personality of the UNSUB. He might not even realize why he was at that church; it might not even be his denomination. He may have thought he was there for religious reasons, to communicate with God. He might consider himself highly moral and whatever he does is because God has told him directly to do it. We could possibly be dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic; at least I would expect him to have had hallucinations or delusions. And these religious delusions could be tied up with his fantasies about children. When you finally identify this guy, I said, expect to find elaborate diaries and scrapbooks, possibly even some poetry, related to his obsession with children and possibly even this particular child. You’ll also find one or more Bibles with many passages underlined and/or meticulous notes in the margins. He will
be
something of a loner, with a poor self-image, probably overweight. He could be big and strong since he’d had to get this presumably struggling child quietly out of the church, but he wouldn’t be a good-looking guy. If he were in his twenties or (more likely) thirties, he might have some kind of physical disfigurement or speech impediment that made him self-conscious. If he were in his forties or fifties, I’d expect him to be fat or with a prominent gut and probably losing his hair. He won’t have a large number of friends or any close friends, and so his diaries and scrapbooks will serve as one of his primary means of communication. Some of these guys will even record their thoughts on audio- or videotape, such as videotaping kids getting off a school bus and recording comments about individual children. If the UNSUB becomes worried that the investigation may be closing in on him, he’ll hide his material but he won’t destroy it unless he absolutely has to; it represents his lifelong avocation.

This type of individual will be obsessed with the case and the murder investigation. In his scrapbook he’ll have every newspaper clipping he can find, particularly those with photographs. The picture of Cassie the police had shown me had also been published in the newspapers and I was confident the UNSUB had kept a clipping of it.

He could easily have gone to the funeral. He might have made repeated visits to the grave site. He probably took souvenirs from the child—I had noted Cassie’s barrettes were missing—and some of these guys have been known to return missing items and to “talk to” their victims at the grave. Another possibility for the souvenirs was to give them to another child. In this way, he could “transfer” his obsession with the dead girl.

The disposal site was symbolic. By tossing this little girl in the trash when he was finished with her, he was, in effect, saying that he had the right to do with her what he wanted, that he was justified in his actions. This would tie in with the religious delusions. His direct contact with God would help him rationalize the murder and deal with it. Either God wanted the UNSUB’s help in reclaiming this pure soul into heaven, or she needed to be punished or purged and he was God’s instrument in this. For this reason, he might be attending church more frequently than before. This would be one way to deal with his stress. Another would be through alcohol or drugs.

When you have this symbolic a scene, you expect the killer to return to it, to the cemetery, or to some location significant to the victim and the crime. Stakeouts can often lead to positive results, which is why I suggested periodic “reminders” in the media as to where Cassie was buried.

This struck me as a serial type offender, and with most of them, you generally see a precipitating Stressor in the hours, days, or weeks before the crime. The two most common, as I’ve said, have to do with jobs and relationshipslosing one or the other—but any type of hardship, particularly an economic one, can trigger the violent outburst. The only important qualification is that the stressor represents something with which the UNSUB can’t cope, that makes him feel he’s been unfairly dealt with, or that the world is out to get him. Then—since I believed this offender had some sort of past with child molestation or sex crimes when the opportunity presented itself, when he saw a child without anyone else around, where the risks of being seen or stopped were small, he instantly and instinctively sprang into action.

I told the police officers that regardless of whether they
had any good suspects or not, they should state publicly that the investigation was going well. I suggested to Deputy Chief LaBath that he go on television and declare that if it took him his entire career, he was going to make sure that this case was solved and the killer was brought to justice; that would keep up the emotional pressure on him.

Because this UNSUB would be feeling the pressure. As I mentioned, alcohol could be one manifestation of this, but I felt it wouldn’t help enough. He might have confided his act to another person, and if he had, that person could easily be in danger as the heat rose. He would be getting more and more desperate as he tried to figure out whether the length of time that had passed since the crime meant he was home free, or whether the investigative case was closing in on him. That desperation could easily take the form of another criminal act.

If and when the police did have a good suspect, I suggested making the pressure more overt. When John Wayne Gacy became the prime suspect in the disappearance of young boys around the Chicago area, Des Plaines police detectives undertook an overt, high-profile surveillance, dogging Gacy wherever he went. At first the rotund construction contractor took it as a joke, even inviting two of the detectives to dinner. Knowing the police would not want to pick him up on anything trivial, he toyed with them by openly defying traffic laws and smoking marijuana. The pressure continued to grow, though, and eventually Gacy cracked. He invited police right into his house, where they smelled rotting flesh. Ultimately, they picked him up on a drug charge, got a search warrant, and found the first of thirtythree bodies concealed in the structure of his home.

I thought a similar tack could work here. If a suspect went to church, the police should go to church with him. If he went to a restaurant, they should go to the restaurant with him. Let him see you knocking on his neighbor’s door. I also suggested rattling him by having some female voice call him regularly, sob on the phone, and then hang up. You’ve got to be imaginative about not letting the subject off the emotional hook.

This kind of offender would probably be nocturnal. If the police went by his residence at night, they would find lights
on. He would also be nomadic, driving around after dark. He won’t flee the area because he knows that might alert investigators, and anyway, he feels at least partially justified in what he did. At that time, there was a technique known as psychological stress evaluation, or PSE, that was popular in certain law enforcement circles, particularly in the Midwest. Using specific observation parameters and an electronic device something like a polygraph, PSE was supposed to detect deception during interrogation. Personally, I didn’t set much store in it, particularly with subjects who had rationalized their acts in their own minds. He wouldn’t give them any satisfaction if they confronted him with killing the little girl. The only line of questioning that might elicit some telling response, I thought, would be challenging him on having masturbated on her since we did have the semen deposit on her tights.

Once I’d described the type of individual I objectively thought was responsible for Cassie Hansen’s abduction and murder, the police told me that during the course of the investigation they had conducted more than five hundred interviews and considered 108 possible suspects.

One in particular stood out remarkably. “When you described what we should be looking for, you hit this guy on about ten major points,” Captain Trooien commented.

The suspect in question was a fifty-year-old, six-foot-tall white male cab driver named Stuart W. Knowlton. He had been approached by the police after being seen driving in the area near the church the day Cassie disappeared but he refused to be questioned and refused to take a polygraph. He was of stocky build, had short gray hair and a receding hairline, and wore glasses. The police told me he was known to frequent area churches and had a history of child sexual abuse, including charges involving his own children. After our consultation, the police concentrated on him as their prime suspect, placing the others they’d been following on the back burner.

Despite police suspicions, however, there wasn’t enough to charge him, so he was still free. But coincidentally, about three weeks before this telephone conference, Knowlton had been hit by a car while walking home and lost about half of one leg. It wasn’t going to be difficult to keep track of
him for a while, because he was still in the Ramsey County Nursing Home rehabilitating.

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.