Journey into Darkness (43 page)

There was only one problem with him in Jud’s opinion. “I kept going back to this little three-year-old,” he says. “And what kept tugging at me was that I was convinced this UNSUB truly had to be known to the victims.”

The suspect the police had picked up had never met the Newmans.

“In the textbook sense, he does fit our model, but you don’t have the right man,” Jud stated confidently during a conference call with members of the task force. They pointed out that in every other way except for knowing the family, he was perfect. But Jud stuck to his guns, saying that in this particular case, knowing the family was the key point in the profile; nothing else mattered as much—not age, not occupation, not pre- or post-offense behavior.

Jud advised that it would not be a very good move that early in the investigation to do a confrontational interview. If the guy didn’t pan out, it would set everything back and the police would lose both confidence and credibility and the real culprit would have breathed a sigh of relief.

“I couldn’t bring myself to accept that a stranger would spend this much time in the home or that the kinds of property he’d taken were the kinds of things a stranger would have taken. There was a certain amount of risk a stranger would have taken to enter the apartment that night, and as we got more and more forensic evidence, I was pretty sure they had the wrong person.”

The victims were tied up with cord from the Newman residence. “You don’t have to do that if you’re just interested in killing someone,” Jud explains. “It suggests you want to have some extended interaction with your victim, some sort of negotiation. I did not believe the individual they had in mind as their prime suspect had the sophistication to be up to wanting to spend that much time with his victims. He would have needed better interpersonal skills, a better skill at communicating and negotiating than I felt he had. I was reading a lot of dynamics into that act alone and when I juxtaposed that against the person they wanted to go out to interview, it was sort of telling me, no, no, no.”

The wounds didn’t support the profile of a sexual sadist, but they definitely showed tremendous rage directed at each specific victim, a key reason to discount a stranger. A stranger just doesn’t do this; he has no reason to. There’s no motivation for it. It has nothing to do with either MO or any conceivable signature.

Another reason was the types of items that were taken.
A manually operated 35mm camera was missing, and the UNSUB took money from a tin in the kitchen cabinet in which Nancy placed her tips. The tin was not in plain sight, so the UNSUB either would have to have come upon it in a search of the premises, or else known where it was. Now, with as much time as he spent in the apartment, he certainly could have undertaken a search of the entire place. Yet there was no ransacking and very little was out of order, which would be inconsistent with an otherwise disorganized offender. You don’t leave the murder scenes themselves looking like a slaughterhouse, then meticulously go through the apartment looking for stuff to steal, perfectly replacing everything you don’t want. Professional burglars can do this; disorganized rapist-murderers don’t.

In the midst of the two-hour conference call with the task force, one of the detectives said, “Well, what do you think, Jud? This is the best guy we’ve got going.”

Jud reiterated that they had to find a white male in his twenties who knew the Newmans well. Once they did, he said, they would find that this individual had had a particular beef against little Angie, and had experienced some precipitating Stressor in his life—probably related to either employment or a failed relationship—in the days immediately preceding the murders.

The detective said, “Well, there is a nephew of hers; actually it’s her husband’s nephew.”

“A nephew?” Jud repeated.

“Yeah, but he’s been about five or six hundred miles southwest of Anchorage, and from what I hear, he’s just gotten back into town.”

Jud said, “That’s your man!”

“What do you mean?” the detective asked.

“This the kind of guy you want to look at. He’s the one you want to zero in on.”

His name was Kirby Anthoney. He was twenty-three years of age and had come up to Anchorage in September of 1985 from Twin Falls, Idaho, in what Alaskans refer to as “the Lower Forty-Eight,” and had lived with the Newmans for a time.

“You look into his background,” Jud said, predicting
they’d find a bad background. “And you’ll find some events in his life that set in motion these killings.”

Police investigated Anthoney and discovered that he and his girlfriend, Debbie Heck, who had come up with him from Idaho, had been working on a fishing boat operating out of Dutch Harbor, one of the many bays along the Aleutian Island chain. About two weeks before the murders, Debbie had taken up with the skipper of the boat, who then fired Kirby. Debbie later told investigators Kirby had a bad temper and had hit her on numerous occasions. Kirby believed the skipper had stolen his girl and then thrown him off the job to avoid the competition. He came back to Anchorage angry and dejected.

Jud predicted that Anthoney would be cooperative with police, primarily in an effort to figure out where they were in the investigation and how much they knew about him. If they hadn’t charged him, once the level of intensity and publicity died down, Jud said, he’d find a seemingly legitimate reason to get out of town.

Analysis of his behavior after the murders certainly supported him as a suspect. Even though he had lived with John and Nancy (so, for a time, had Debbie), he hadn’t gone to her funeral. He had had only perfunctory contact with John when he returned from San Francisco, even though John was clearly grief-stricken and in need of emotional support from loved ones. It was also learned that he had a roommate, Dan Grant, and was staying on Eagle Street, about three blocks from the Newmans.

After the conference call with Jud, the Anchorage police and the Alaska state troopers got on him hot and heavy. They interviewed him several times, during which he admitted nothing. Meanwhile, they were working on developing warrants on him, but to Anthoney, it seemed that the investigation was tapering off. That was when he left town, just as Jud had predicted. Expecting that he would try to cross over into Canada, Alaska state troopers notified the Canadian Border Patrol to be on the lookout for him and the Canadian authorities picked him up for driving with an invalid permit.

When they arrested Anthoney and executed their search
warrant, they found Nancy’s 35mm camera and when they examined him, he had lice around his genital area.

What had happened by way of background was this: when John left town after his accident, the situation in the Newman household quickly deteriorated. According to Nancy’s sister, Cheryl Chapman, Kirby began acting strangely. He was mean to the children. He wasn’t working but was hanging around with unsavory characters, not the kinds Nancy wanted around her daughters.

And the reason he was up in Anchorage at all, it turned out, was that he had run into some problems back in Idaho. He’d been the prime suspect in the sexual assault and near murder of a twelve-year-old girl on a lakefront beach. But police couldn’t make the case because the girl had been brain-damaged as a result of the attack and couldn’t identify her assailant. When Anchorage PD then talked to the chief of police there, though, he said he was absolutely convinced that the girl would have been killed if someone hadn’t happened upon them.

Nancy told her sister Cheryl that Kirby was giving her the creeps. Jud also believed there was strong reason to believe that he’d made improper overtures to her. Feeling uncomfortable and unsafe around him without her husband around, she told him to leave the house. That was when he went down to Dutch Harbor with his girlfriend.

So when he loses both her and his job, he drifts back to Anchorage, feeling completely rejected and that everything is stacking up against him. Jud speculated that he must have approached his Aunt Nancy again and tried to get her to take him back, but that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

The likely scenario is that he goes over to the Newman apartment early Saturday morning with the idea of either changing her mind or getting back at her for rejecting him. He sneaks in the same window he had used in the past to come in after hours, which puts him in Angle’s room. While she remains asleep, he moves into Nancy’s bedroom and confronts her. Perhaps he was friendly or beseeching at first, but it was almost a sure thing that his showing up in her bedroom at 6:00 in the morning scared the hell out of her and only confirmed all of her worst fears about him. So at
that point, she wouldn’t have welcomed him back into the household with open arms, and probably told him to get the hell out and never come back.

This, of course, would have confirmed for him everything he was feeling about the world being against him and would have been just the trigger he needed to lash out. All the resentment that had been bottled up in him for such a long time was finally given vent and a target. How dare she reject him like that! There would be no more reason for suppressing the lust he felt for her that had so far gone unrequited.

Anthoney had a solid alibi for Friday night. But there was strong evidence that the killings had taken place around 6:30 or 7:00 Saturday morning. Not only was there the behavioral indicator of the offender washing up before he left, there were coffee cups in the bedroom, and by the time the autopsy and lab reports came back, it was known that Nancy’s bladder was empty when she died, all suggesting she wasn’t killed in the middle of the night as Anthoney’s lawyers eventually contended. He had no alibi for that morning.

The task force drew up warrants for three counts of murder, one count of first-degree sexual assault, and one count of kidnapping. A telling detail came when he was picked up and the arresting officer informed him of the charges against him.

Anthoney’s reply, rather than the outrage, shock, or “Holy shit!” you’d expect from an innocent man in such circumstances was, “What’s this kidnapping all about?” Apparently, he couldn’t figure it out because as far as he was concerned, that’s one thing he hadn’t done.

Technically though, one of the elements of kidnapping in a number of states, Alaska among them, has to do with exerting control over individuals and moving them against their will by force or violence, even if it is only from one spot in the room to another.

Based on how the forensic people had reconstructed the crime scene from evidence such as blood transfer between murder scenes, it was not only possible to determine the order of death, but it also gave Jud a good idea of what had happened.

The rapes and murders were all very violent. And based
on the amount of time the offender had spent with Nancy before moving on to the two girls, Jud theorized that while Nancy’s rape was definitely forcible and coerced, there was also an element of cooperation on her part—a desperate attempt to negotiate with him and buy some time. “All right,” he imagined her saying, “just don’t hurt the girls.”

“But unfortunately, once an offender like this commits to an aggravated act like rape, there’s no amount of reasoning at that point that would keep him from having to get rid of all the potential witnesses. A stranger would not necessarily have had to do this because he wouldn’t have been recognized and identified. He wouldn’t have assumed he was going to find materials in the house he could use for control devices, either.

“And I think he really wanted to humiliate this woman,” Jud continues. “That’s why he tied her up. And I believe some of this activity may have been done to her with the daughters watching.”

He had gotten eight-year-old Melissa out of bed and run her down the hallway. That was obvious from the way the body was found and her blood detected in the mother’s bedroom. She was found tied as well.

The crime scene photos show little Angie’s bloody body lying on the floor of her room with her toys and books scattered around her. Cheryl Chapman reported that Kirby, who used to baby-sit for the girls, considered Angie a “tyrant,” and was annoyed, apparently, when she acted like a typical three-year-old.

It’s possible that the swath the killer ritualistically wiped across Angie’s vaginal area and belly were an indication of some small degree of remorse for having butchered his first cousin. Jud doesn’t believe this, though. “He had enough time to clean himself up. He had enough time to look for money and the camera and other things that he took. Certainly he had time to do something at the crime scene, covering up the little girl or any of the things we see, if he had one ounce of remorse. I didn’t see any of this. It was just a cold-blooded, brutal killing.”

What we saw on the child could have been an ineffective attempt to begin cleaning up so much blood that he
simply abandoned the effort when he realized how formidable a task it would be. Or it might have had some significance only to him that the rest of us will never know. The murder weapon was the one item he brought with him, a sharp-edged knife, believed to be one Anthoney often carried.

Looking at the photographs, Jud knew the killer was completely out of control at the height of his savagery. Jud also knew that, given another Stressor of similar magnitude, he would find a new target and kill again. Killing a small child is about as cowardly an act as any of us could conceive, and he was obviously displacing his anger against everyone else by assaulting and mutilating her.

“You can’t go kick the boss’s ass and you can’t go kick your ex-girlfriend’s butt, and you can’t get back at mom, but you really can expend all of this energy against a little child who can’t fight back,” Jud says. “Kirby wanted to shock the consciousness of whoever found the bodies, knowing Nancy’s sister would probably be the person who found them. He’d probably killed these people a hundred times in his mind, given the stresses that were generated in the home and at work. Even if he hadn’t murdered these particular people under this particular circumstance, it was just a matter of time before a guy like this would have killed. The fantasy of killing is always sort of lurking in the background.”