Journey into Darkness (45 page)

A few years ago, Jud left the Investigative Support Unit and is now chief of the International Training and Assistance Unit, also based in Quantico. In a literal sense, he’s moved up in the world. Now his second-floor office has a window, something he never had when he was with us, since our warren of rooms was sixty feet belowground. But even though Jud is now in a more “main-line” FBI job, his faith in and enthusiasm for what he used to do is as great as ever.

“The Bureau has to get involved with this thing bigger than they are. I am absolutely convinced that the answers are there. All the reams of paperwork on these unsolved cases around the world today and especially in this country—it is my sense that they can be solved because the commonalities of these crime scenes are there and it is a matter of the FBI beginning to lead once again to fine-tune the process where they carry this thing to the next level. I think
we’ve only scratched the surface of profiling and crime scene analysis and all the other things we do,” Jud asserts. “I think that if we really did more good studies and got back into the prisons and brought in more manpower and really devoted time to what I think is the most pressing problem facing us—violent crime against our citizens—we could make tremendous progress. I think the Bureau has a great role to play here.”

Carolyn Hamm, a hardworking thirty-two-year-old attorney in the field of historic preservation, hadn’t shown up at her office in Washington, D.C., for two days, and this wasn’t like her. Normally, she’d call in if she were running five minutes behind schedule, and here she’d missed several appointments without canceling them or following up afterward. At first her secretary didn’t panic because she knew Carolyn had been running around for several days trying to get ready for a long and much-needed vacation to Peru. But when she still didn’t show up for work after three days, panic set in. She called Carolyn’s best friend and asked her to stop by her house and check. It was late January of 1984.

Carolyn’s house was a trim white clapboard rambler with contrasting dark shutters on South Twenty-third Street in Arlington, Virginia. When her friend arrived, she noticed the front door was slightly open, allowing snow to drift inside. This was definitely not like Carolyn. Afraid, she found a young man down the street and asked him to go inside with her.

They found Carolyn’s nude body in the basement, lying face-down across the doorway into the garage. Her wrists had been tied behind her with a long section of cord ripped from a Venetian blind and there was a noose around her neck fashioned from rope that had been used to bind a rolled-up carpet. The rope from the noose was pulled up over a ceiling pipe and down again, then tied to the bumper
of Carolyn’s Fiat in the garage. They didn’t see any blood or bruises on her, but it was obvious she had been dead for some time.

When Arlington police arrived, they were able to determine that the killer entered the house through a basement window where a ventilation hose to the clothes dryer had been removed. On top of the carpet roll where the noose ligature had come from was a six-inch knife, presumably used by the UNSUB to keep her under control. Nothing appeared to be missing from the house except some cash from Carolyn’s purse, which was found upstairs with its contents spilled on the floor. A police canvass of the neighborhood revealed nothing. No one, not even the neighborhood watch representative, had seen anything unusual.

During the autopsy, the medical examiner found a lubricant resembling petroleum jelly around the victim’s mouth, vaginal and rectal areas, as well as semen in her vagina and on her thighs. There was also evidence of semen on her bathrobe, which was upstairs in the living room. There was a small abrasion on her left instep, indicating that she was dragged across the floor. The time of death was estimated to be after 10:00 on the night of January 22 or very early morning on January 23.

Detectives Robert Carrig and Chuck Shelton began with victimology. Carolyn Hamm, like many well-educated, young professionals in the D.C. metropolitan area, spent much of her time at the prestigious downtown law firm where she worked; she was not well-known to her neighbors. Friends confirmed she was a loner—not the type to pick up men in bars. In fact, she’d had just a few romances. Police found one angry letter from an ex-boyfriend, but he was quickly ruled out as a suspect when his alibi was verified, putting him out of state at the time of the attack.

The two detectives theorized the intruder broke in on the afternoon of January 22 and waited for his victim to return home. What was unclear was how much of the crime was planned: was it a rape/robbery gone bad or had he planned to kill all along? Murders in Arlington were rare, despite the fact that the county is just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., home to one of the nation’s highest murder rates. Arlington averaged just four or five a year, leaving
the eight robbery/homicide detectives to work mostly robberies, taking turns with murder cases when they occurred.

Actually, it wasn’t Carrig’s or Shelton’s turn to work a homicide case. The Hamm murder was to be Detective Joe Horgas’s, but he happened to be out of town at a family event when the body was discovered. Horgas had sixteen years with the ACPD and it had been two years since he last worked a homicide. When he got back to town about a week later, he couldn’t help but look into the case. And when he did, he noticed that two break-ins had been reported within days of the rape-murder, just blocks from Hamm’s house. In addition to location, the break-ins shared other characteristics with the Hamm case. In all three instances, the subject gained access through a small rear window.

In one break-in, the subject accosted a single female resident, threatening her with a knife, sexually assaulting her, and demanding money. When she resisted, he slashed her and fled. She gave police a description of her attacker: a black male, about five feet ten inches tall, slight build, wearing a cap, gloves, and mask.

In the second break-in, the intruder apparently grew tired of waiting. He left before his intended victim came back home. But he left some things for her: among other items, pornographic magazines were found on her bed, along with the cord from a Venetian blind. To Horgas, the three crimes were obviously related. He also saw a connection to a series of nearby rapes in the past few months.

The description provided by the victim of the one breakin matched a subject known to police as the “black masked rapist.” At least nine victims in Arlington County had given the same description of a masked rapist since June of 1983. When Horgas realized the crimes weren’t being investigated in connection to the murder, he brought his theory to his supervisor, Sergeant Frank Hawkins, who reminded him Hamm wasn’t his case but encouraged him to pursue the break-in connection. Horgas issued a regional teletyped broadcast to departments in northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland, describing the suspect and a vehicle seen in front of a victim’s house. Maybe someone out there would recognize their guy.

In the meantime, Carrig and Shelton came down to Quantico
and met with Roy Hazelwood and me to get a profile of the killer and tips on how to interview such a suspect if he was caught. We had crime scene photos and the autopsy report to work with, but virtually nothing in the way of forensic evidence. We were dealing with the case in isolation, not knowing about any potentially related crimes. There was a fair amount of criminal sophistication evident in the scene, indicating someone with experience behind him. And at that time, the rape-murders we were seeing were almost exclusively intraracial. In fact, this is still largely true today; this type of criminal tends to target his own race. Based on that, Roy described a subject who would likely be a white male in his thirties, and I agreed with this assessment. There were signs of both maturity and immaturity at the scene: dumping the purse and taking only cash was immature, while the careful attention to detail in the bindings, with no other bruises or wounds, were signs of a more mature killer. This could indicate two offenders or one killer with two sides to his personality.

Carrig and Shelton tried to match up their notes from Quantico against leads. Meanwhile, Horgas checked the teletype daily, but no responses were forthcoming. Then, on February 6, 1984, Carrig and Shelton arrested thirty-seven-year-old David Vasquez and charged him with the murder of Carolyn Hamm, two weeks before.

Vasquez had recently moved out of a friend’s house in Hamm’s neighborhood to live with his mother in Manassas, about an hour’s drive away. In the days before Hamm’s body was discovered, however, two neighbors reported seeing him around her house.

When the detectives visited the house where Vasquez used to live, in his old room they found girlie magazines, mostly of the
Playboy
and
Penthouse
variety, though one magazine had a photo of a woman bound and gagged, with a rope ligature around her neck. Detectives also found pictures he’d taken of women—obviously from a distance and without their knowledge—through their windows and in various stages of undress. It’s not unusual to find this type of offender with a large pornography collection, either storebought or homemade, and while I don’t believe there is any reliable data showing that pornography causes men to go
out and commit sex crimes, our research does show that certain types of sadomasochistic and bondage-oriented material can fuel the fantasies of those already leaning in that direction. So while there’s nothing abnormal about a man wanting to look at naked women in the magazines, the one bondage picture was disturbingly close to the actual crime and the “peeper pictures” showed a willingness to violate another person’s privacy on at least a basic level.

Carrig and Shelton picked Vasquez up at a McDonald’s in Manassas, where he performed custodial functions, and brought him in for questioning. Over the course of several interrogation sessions, Vasquez confessed to the murder.

He couldn’t be linked forensically to semen samples from Hamm’s body or bathrobe, but hair samples from the scene had characteristics consistent with Vasquez’s pubic hair. And Vasquez’s alibi—that he was bowling that night—couldn’t be verified. His mother then vouched for him, saying he was with her, but she had changed her story—she first told investigators that she was at work and didn’t know where her son was—and could not provide any corroboration.

As suggested by several of the details of his life, such as his job and the fact that in his late thirties he still lived with his mother, Vasquez was not blessed with a high IQ. Investigators therefore believed he must have had a partner in crime—he just didn’t seem smart or sophisticated enough to carry it off by himself. In mixed presentations at a crime scene, Roy Hazelwood and I had occasionally seen two offenders working together. Police figured Vasquez could have been the one who left the signs of immaturity. His only known prior run-in with the law was stealing coins from a laundromat as a teenager.

Evidence pointing to the existence of a partner included the semen samples, two sets of shoe prints outside the house, and other aspects of David Vasquez’s life that would require him to have assistance, such as the fact that he didn’t drive: he was at his job in Manassas the day of the murder and made it back to work on time the next morning at 7:00. There were no buses available to meet that time frame and he had no other means of travel. He would have needed someone to drive him to Hamm’s and back. And David Vasquez was not particularly strong. His co-workers told
police he had difficulty trying to unload thirty-pound boxes from trucks; Hamm outweighed Vasquez by at least that. He just wasn’t physically or mentally capable of acting alone. Investigators and his attorneys tried to get him to reveal the mastermind in the brutal crime but Vasquez wouldn’t name any names. His lawyers even had him interviewed under the influence of a chemical “truth serum,” but he still implicated himself so they didn’t use it in his defense.

The evidence against him included three taped confessions and two independent eyewitnesses who placed him at the scene. In the end, David Vasquez agreed to an Alford plea to a charge of second-degree murder—not a guilty plea but acknowledging that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to try and convict the defendant of a more serious crime. With the plea, Vasquez’s attorneys avoided the possibility of the death penalty if he’d been tried and convicted. Instead, he received a sentence of thirty-five years in prison.

Although many believed a partner was still out there, the Hamm case was officially closed.

On December 1,1987, as the result of a 911 call, Arlington police received a dispatch to “check on the welfare” of a woman whose neighbor was worried that she wasn’t answering her door or phone and hadn’t been seen in days. Typically, police responding to this type of call find an elderly person who’s fallen in the bath or suffered a heart attack. But this time, patrolmen William Griffith and Dan Borelli found a much younger person who’d met a far grislier fate.

The moment they arrived at the two-story, Georgian-style brick, attached two-family home—just thirteen minutes after the 911 call—they found reasons to be suspicious: the back door was unlocked and open as wide as the chair wedged under the knob allowed. Inside, they saw a purse lying on the floor, its contents spilled haphazardly, and instantly smelled the distinctive odor of decomposing flesh.

Upstairs, in her bedroom, they found the body of Susan M. Tucker, lying face-down and naked across the bed, her head hanging over the edge. Her killer had wrapped a white rope tightly around her neck, then down her back to a point where her wrists were tied together, with extra rope wrapped around the binding. A sleeping bag was placed over
the middle of her body. The bedroom was ransacked, with clothing, bank statements, and other personal effects scattered throughout.

Although Susan Tucker was married, for the past few months she’d been living alone while her husband, Reggie, was in Wales. A Welsh native, he’d left three months earlier to secure a job and set up house. She was to join him there in a few weeks.